Celebrate the Year of the Dragon

Chinese New Year (also sometimes called Lunar New Year) is February 10 this year, and to celebrate we’ve got a great collection of new year’s crafts. 2024 is the year of the dragon. Dragons are said to be charismatic, intelligent, confident and naturally gifted and lucky.

Dragon years are thought to bring good luck, and this year is the year of the wood dragon, which is expected to be a good time for growth, progress and abundance, which I think we would all take.

This printable Chinese zodiac placemat coloring page is so cute, and it will help you figure out what animal’s year everyone in the family was born in and what that means. You can download it from 3 Boys and a Dog.

Tot Schooling has printable lanterns for each of the animals in the Chinese zodiac that you can print, color and assemble to decorate for the holiday. They also have a collection of easy color by number pages, one for each animal.

In the Playroom has some cute printable activities including a coloring page, maze, word search, word scramble, do a dot page, follow the lines, I spy and a number puzzle. They are free to download.

Speaking of I Spy, Paper Trail Design has another cute I spy page with a new year theme.

Chalk Academy has a post full of craft ideas for Chinese New Year and explains why it’s not accurate to call it Lunar New Year (while lots of Asian cultures celebrate the new year at this time, the things we in the west typically associate with the celebration, like the zodiac, red envelopes, lanterns and dragons are really specific to Chinese culture). They also have a Lunar New Year activity pack you can buy that includes more traditions from other countries.

Messy Little Monster has a great collection of Chinese New Year crafts as well, which includes several dragon crafts if you’re looking for something specific to 2024 (though dragons are always a part of new year’s celebrations in China).

This paper plate dragon twirler from Red Ted Art is so cool and easy to make.

And don’t miss this roundup of books about the Chinese New Year if you want to learn more!

Chinese New Year Decorations

Chinese New Year Books

Next Plan Idea:

Easy Activities for Lunar New Year

With summer coming soon in the Northern Hemisphere, it’s a fun time to incorporate activities and crafts with a sunny theme. Take some time to learn about the sun (this post from National Geographic Kids is a good one) and then do some sun activities.

Sun prints are a classic summer activity, and there are lots of ways to do them, from placing objects on construction paper (like in this craft from MomBrite) or by using sun print paper (aka cyanotype paper).

Practice threading, counting, color sorting and other skills with this easy sun threading activity from Taming Little Monsters.

Lessons 4 Little Ones has a great blog post full of ideas for science experiments using the sun, such as melting crayons, looking at shadows, making a sun dial and trying a solar oven. Printables to go with the lessons are available for purchase or you can just talk through the students’ hypotheses about what will happen and draw or otherwise record the results.

This updraft tower from Almost Unschoolers is a cool way to illustrate that the heat of the sun causes an updraft, which makes the pinwheel spin. This is a good one to do inside near a sunny window so you don’t have wind spinning the pinwheel instead.

You’ll want to get out in the sun to try this experiment form Life with Moore Babies to see what kinds of things the sun can melt. Using different kinds of sweets you can see how the sun melts things by itself and how you can concentrate the power of the sun with a magnifying glass.

Playing with shadows is fun for kids of all ages, and you can track a shadow through the day with this experiment from Science Sparks. If you’re working with multiple kids they can each choose an object to shadow (ha!) and at the end of the day you can see how different their shadows looked.

And of course you’ll want to make a sun themed suncatcher craft, right? This one from Fox Farm Home uses all the pretty flowers you collect on your nature walk and puts them in a sun-shaped frame.

Next Plan Idea:

Have you read?

Leave a Reply