Make Fun Paper Lanterns for Chinese New Year

Chinese New Year is coming up soon (Jan. 28, to be exact) and it’s a lot of fun to talk about the traditions surrounding the holiday and to make crafts related to it.

Several times over the years we have gone to a presentation our local library does related to Chinese New Year, where they talk about the traditions and have traditional dancers (and a dragon).

A classic kid craft for Chinese New Year is making paper lanterns. They are made from red paper because red scares the dragon away.

I like this spin on Chinese lanterns from NurtureStore, where they used sparkly paint to decorate them and did a couple of different construction methods.

While you’re checking that tutorial out, make sure you don’t miss Cathy’s other great content for Chinese New Year including sensory writing, a few different dragon crafts, counting in Chinese and more. So much fun!

Do you celebrate Chinese New Year or do anything special for it with your kids? I’d love to hear about it! It’s the year of the rooster so I’ll have to pull together some rooster crafts soon.

[Photo via NurtureStore.]

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Celebrate the Year of the Dragon

Giving math a holiday twist is fun for kids of any age, but little ones especially will have more fun learning math concepts when there’s a bit of Christmas involved. Check out more Christmas math activities for older kids here.

Teaching Mama has a great set of printable Christmas activities for preschoolers, most of with have some connection to math. There’s connect the dots, repeating patterns, counting, color by number, number puzzles and more. And it’s totally free!

Practice counting by making candy canes with pipe cleaners and beads. This is such an easy activity and a great idea, I can’t believe I didn’t think of it before. Get all the details from Nurture Store. You could also turn these into little wreaths or other holiday shapes if you want.

Print out the counting mats from Living Life and Learning, grab some festive little pompoms or other counters (Christmas erasers, coins in red and green, whatever you have handy) and kids can practice counting numbers from 1 to 12 and working on one to one correspondence.

Preschool Play and Learn has a similar idea using Christmas tree shapes, but these don’t have spaces for you to add the decorations, just numbers for the number to add to each one. These are meant to be playdough mats, but you could also use pom poms, beads or even miniature Christmas ornaments to decorate your trees while you count to 20.

Or try these printable Christmas number puzzles from Math Kids and Chaos. The two-part puzzles feature a number on one side and the same number of some Christmas-themed thing on the other side. The edges of the pieces only match with the one that’s correct. You could combine this one with a counting activity to have kids count out the number of counters that the numeral shows, then match with the piece that shows that number of things and count them again. The set includes puzzles with numbers one to 10 and ten frames with numbers one to 20.

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