**UPDATE: I have added MORE crafts!!! Click over here for 15 great Chinese New Year Crafts for Kids!****
There are so many great ideas for Chinese New Year crafts! Hands-on crafts help make the celebration come alive to your children. Once your class has discussed the Chinese New Year celebration and the many symbols of the festival, it is time to make a craft. There are several simple crafts that I have used with children, from preschool through elementary.
Spring Blossoms: A simple painting project with brown and pink paint. Kids use paint brushes to paint the twigs and cotton balls to paint the blossoms.
The same project can be done by slightly older kids, as seen here:
Red Paper Lanterns: Follow the instructions here to make this simple Chinese New Year craft.
Dragon Puppets: Print out this great dragon printable, and follow the instructions from craftjr.com.
Translating Names: Solicit a parent to come in and write your students’ names in Mandarin or Cantonese.
Rice Dough Figurines: For thousands of years, Chinese artisans have been making rice dough figurines. With the same techniques of molding the dough and using various tools to create intricate details, your students can make playdough figures. In 2010, the Year of the Tiger, we made tiger designs out of black and orange playdough. Older children can study Chinese dough figurines to get ideas before beginning.
Chinese New Year Math and Literacy! Check out all of our Lunar New Year Resources.
Available at the Kid World Citizen Teachers Pay Teachers Store, these units are an incredible collection of Common Core aligned reading, writing, math, and critical thinking activities, as well as craftivities and coloring sheets. Kids have fun doing word problems, scrambles, graphing, a maze- and they learn about Chinese culture. Go now! >
There are so many cool crafts to make!
This is so well put together! Thank you so very much for helping me create a little Global Citizen of my daughter.
This will be the basis of a new tradition in our home in rural Wisconsin.
Nina- that is great! It doesn’t matter where we live, we can bring the world to our kids and help them become more aware about the cultures around the world. I am so happy that this web site has helped you:).
We’ve done a couple cool ones in the past couple weeks. http://grtlyblesd.blogspot.com/2014/01/cny-craft-good-fortune-signs.html and http://grtlyblesd.blogspot.com/2014/01/cny-craft-chinese-peg-people.html 🙂