Celebrate the Year of the Pig

Chinese New Year is coming up on February 5, and it’s a fun way to bring a bit of cultural learning and themed crafting into the classroom or the home.

Nuturestore has a great roundup of general Chinese New Year crafts and activities, including classic paper lanterns, dragon crafts and more.

This coming year is the Year of the Pig, which according to Chinese astrology is the symbol of wealth. People born in the year of the pig are said to be logical thinkers and good at solving problems. They are often wealthy but short tempered.

Red Ted Art has a nice collection of pig crafts if you want to add some of them to your celebration.

Do you celebrate Chinese New Year? I’d love to hear about it!

[Photo: Red Ted Art.]

When my daughter was younger she had a ton of LEGO bricks, and I’m honestly a little sad we got rid of most of them because there are so many fun things to do with LEGOs outside of the kits you bought them in.

I love seeing all the ideas people have for LEGO building challenges, and I have shared some ideas for LEGO games before, but I saw one on Pinterest the other day that I felt was worth a mention.

This one is for those ’80s and ’90s kids who spent sick days home from school watching “The Price is Right”: LEGO Plinko!

For those who don’t know about Plinko, the original was a giant peg board set up at an angle and the contestant would drop a flat disc at the top of the board. As it moved down the board it would hit the pegs and change the way it moved, and there would be different prizes in the slots at the bottom where the piece would land.

This version from Play Party Game works on the same principle, using LEGO bricks to make the game board and marbles in place of the Plinko disc since your game board isn’t flat.

You can really use whatever bricks you have for this build, and while it shows all the pegs the same size and evenly spaced, you can play with different configurations and see what happens. It’s engineering and a game!

And while you’re playing with your LEGOs, make sure to check out this post from Kids Craft Room that includes minute to win it style games you can do with LEGO. From speed sorting to tower building as fast as you can, these ideas are sure to get you thinking about different ways to play with LEGO.

And if you need even more ideas, check out my post with LEGO building challenges you can print out for kids (and adults!) to try.

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