Chinese New Year Celebration

We celebrated Chinese New Year with all things Chinese. 

The year 2013 is the “Year of the Snake”. In honor of this, we used bingo markers to design coiled snakes.

The Great Race by Dawn Casey tells the story of the Chinese zodiac and how the animals came to be a part of the calendar.

We read it and then played Dominoes with the zodiac animals.

The Warlord’s Puzzle by Virginia Walton Pilegard tells the tale of the origin of the Chinese tangram. We had tangrams- a parallelogram, a square, and five triangles to play with and use to make designs.

We also used the shapes for a collage.

We practiced using chopsticks with a sensory table full of pom poms (meat and veggies), yarn (noodles)and Chinese take-out boxes. We picked up the pom poms and yarn with chopsticks and placed them in the bowls and boxes. Our table was set up with chopsticks and bowls like in a Chinese restaurant. We used the food from the sensory table to serve at the restaurant. 

For lunch one day, we had Chinese noodles so that we could eat with chopsticks. We used them to eat cheese and oranges too! We did pretty well. All the practice paid off.

Several of the books we read were about the traditional lion dance, typical of Chinese New Year celebrations. The lion dance brings out the dancing dragon. One of our favorites was Lion Dancer: Ernie Wan’s Chinese New Year by Kate Waters.

We played a game called "Dragon, Dragon, What Time is it?". We took turns being the dragon and giving the others things to do. When the dragon announced, "Lunchtime!", everyone dispersed, trying not to get caught by the dragon!

We also read Dragon Dance: A Chinese New Year by Joan Holub and The Dancing Dragon by Marcia Vaughn.

We each designed a fire-breathing dragon mask and told stories about them.

My dragon is named Puppy-Cat.
She lives at the cave.
She has to go in her cave because her friends are in there.
My dragon likes to play cats with her friends.
My dragon roars and breathes fire.
She likes to play freeze tag. 

My dragon breathes a lot of fire and he likes to play with coins.
He throws them.
His name is Barney.
He is a Chinese dragon.

My dragon is named Kitty Kitty.
He lives in a cave, far away next ot a river.
He flies all the way there.
He has his friends there.

Rice is a main staple in China. We had colored rice to play in- to pour, measure, sift and shake.

We read The Runaway Rice Cake (a Chinese rendition of "the Gingerbread Man") by Ying Chang Compestine and had rice cakes for snack.

Gung Hay Fat Choy!