Easy Activities for Lunar New Year

January 17, 2023 by Sarah White Leave a Comment

Lunar New Year (also sometimes called Chinese New Year) is coming up (January 22 in 2023), and it’s a great opportunity to get kids interested in a bit of Asian culture.

One of the most common symbols of Lunar New Year is the dragon, which is said to bring luck in the new year.

Adventures in a Messy Life has a great tutorial for an upcycled dragon craft made with egg cartons and other things you might have lying around the house.

Messy Little Monster has a printable dragon mask and a printable dragon puppet, both of which would be fun for kids to cut out, color and play with. The puppet can even be folded in the middle to look like the long dragons that might be used in a parade this time of year.

Of course it’s not just about dragons, and making and playing musical instruments is another fun thing to do when learning about Lunar New year.

Chinese drums are fun and easy to make with minimal materials. Here’s a version using a wooden spoon and an old CD from Activity Village. I also have one on my blog where we made a monkey drum (bolang gu) out of paper plates and a paper towel roll.

Add some movement into your learning by coming up with yoga poses or other moves to mimic the animals of the Chinese zodiac (this idea is from Carrots are Orange). 2023 is the year of the rabbit, which is a pretty easy one. You can find more on the zodiac and which animals represent which years, here.

We’ve also got a collection of Chinese New Year books to read with kids, and you should also check out this fun, easy, classic paper lantern craft. Here’s another good roundup of Chinese New Year crafts for kids if you need more ideas!

Next Plan Idea:

Celebrate the Year of the Dragon

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Using Pizza and Pretend Play to Learn about Fractions

When my daughter was young she loved the PBS show “Peg + Cat,” and if you’ve got a fan of that show in your house this activity will be even better, but it doesn’t matter if your kids don’t already know these characters to learn about fractions with pizza.

There’s an episode of “Peg + Cat” where they are working in a pizza place and have to divide pies to put different kinds of toppings of different parts of the pie (there’s also an online game with the same concept, which I can’t believe still exists because my kiddo played it years ago).

Inspired by the episode and a companion book, Nature Homeschool developed an activity for learning about fractions and entrepreneurship using pizza. They developed a pizza shop and used the printables and teaching guide from Teacher Vision to learn more about fractions using pizza as the foundation. Their post also has a pizza order form printable you can use when you role play a pizza shop.

The Inspiration Edit also has some cute printable worksheets using a pizza to learn about fractions. And Life Over Cs has some fun printable pizza fraction activities, such as the printable fraction memory game shown here.

If you want to increase the pretend play factor with this one, you can make a pizza and toppings out of paper, cardboard or felt. Or use a paper plate as your crust and simple shapes cut out of paper to be toppings. The pretend play pizza making kit from Glued to My Crafts uses an individual slice, but you could do the same thing with a whole pie’s worth of slices.

Kids Craft Room has another fun pizza play food idea, this time using salt dough for the crust. The toppings are made out of felt so you can practice putting different toppings on a fraction of the pizza and learn as you play.

Next Plan Idea:

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