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.]

Several countries have a day set aside to honor and recognize their inventors, but Nov. 9 is a special one that’s known as Tag der Erfinder in German. It’s celebrated in Germany, Austria and Switzerland and it falls on Nov. 9 because that’s the birthday of Hedy Lamarr.

Hedy Lamarr is widely known as an actress but there’s a lot more to her story. You can get a little of it geared to little kids in the Little People, Big Dreams book Hedy Lamarr (32 pages, hardcover, published 2023 by Frances Lincoln Childrens Books, suggested retail price $15.99).

The book explores her birth in Austria and how she spent time when she was young coming up with inventions. She became an actress, married an arms dealer, made her escape to America and became an actress again.

But she also helped develop a frequency-hopping signal device for airplanes that was used by the Americans and their allies during World War II. That technology became the basis for wireless technology such as wifi and GPS.

While Inventor’s Day is a great time to learn about Hedy Lamarr, you can take this opportunity to check out books and do little studies on lots of different inventors. If there’s an inventor or an invention your child is particularly interested in, that’s a great place to start. It’s fun to think about all the things we use every day that didn’t always exist; someone had to invent them!

For a start here at Craft Gossip you can learn more about Garrett Morgan, who invented traffic lights; Maria Oroso, who developed a clay oven that could cook food without electricity; and more female inventors and scientists.

And for more general inventors’ fun, check out this inventors word search from Fun Findery (and another from Let’s Do Puzzles) or take a quiz on inventors and their inventions from Flanders Family Home Life.

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