Category: Chinese New Year 2012

HERE is a great link from Learning to Give with multiple lessons plans using The Seven Chinese Brothers. There’s a section where they created banners depicting each of the 7 brothers and their talents.  I found a cute video on how to make the Chinese “Paddy” hats they wear in the rice paddies and in the story. I’d like to make hats and list acts of kindness you could do for others in a spiral inside each hat.

So for CHINESE NEW YEAR this year we had many wonderful activities. I think it is important to read multicultural stories of the many cultures represented in your classrooms each year. I have Asian students and so I like to teach the other kids about how Chinese New Year is celebrated in the Asian parts of the world.

And we try to make a little celebration of it in my classroom too. Here we are just before our school parade to the other grades singing the Dragon song and showing them our Chinese Dragons we made….

Chinese New Year Dragons…..

 Here are some of my students showing off their artistic dragons. Peter’s wearing traditional Korean clothes.

Our finished Chinese dragons…..They did their own lettering with black markers….

This is a VERY cute story we read about Sam who gets Chinese New Year Lucky Money to spend on anything he wants. In the end he buys socks for a homeless man who he sees on the streets of the dragon parade so he can keep warm. Very touching story! Check it out above (Sam and the Lucky Money).

You can barely see the tail here but it is very colorful!

We used lots of colorful crepe paper for the tail streamers and the “fire” coming from the mouth of the Chinese Dragons..

Peter’s mom, Mrs. Kim, came and showed us some Asian Cultural items after our parade! Here’s the Korean Flag. She is explaining the black markings mean things like fire and water….brother and sister….opposites….

Here is Peter with his mother and all the things they brought for us to see….

Traditional Korean clothing….so pretty!

Asian foods their family likes to eat….Sushi!

Thanks for coming in to teach us Mrs. Kim! We loved it!

More festival costumes of Korea…..

Peter showing us an bow he learned to do…..

Wedding dress clothing represented by these Korean Wedding Dolls….Girls would wear a dress looking similar to this one in red and green….

More traditional Korean clothing…so beautiful!

Tae Kwon Do is the Korean martial arts…the only one that is an Official Olympic Sport….

Peter shows off his black belt and martial arts bear…..

Korean money….$10,000 in Korean money means $1,000 in our money… The top picture shows the famous Korean who did their alphabet we learned….

Here’s Peter showing us a kid’s favorite book Where The Wild Things Are…printed in the Korean language. It was wonderful to see so many things from Korea! Thanks Peter! And Thanks to Mrs. Kim who did an excellent job teaching us about some of the customs of Korea.

We started with a   MAKING WORDS activity using THE YEAR OF THE DRAGON to try and make as many words as possible. I set the timer for 3 minutes and the kids came up with as many as 32 words in that time. It was a lot of fun to see them get into the competition!  Then we looked at a Chinese Calendar (the animal calendar in the round) and figured out what year we were each born.
                               THE YEAR OF THE DRAGON!
Then we Read some fun literature. The first one we read as a play while I put up the book pictures on the document camera. I just typed up the text of the book and had 4 narrators (each table became a narrator) and the 7 brothers, the Emperor and the Guards. I must say Allie and Emma had the most memorable expression as they acted out their parts!

We did a Readers Theater Play of The Seven Chinese Brothers.….

HERE at Loveland K12 is a list of activities to go along with the story The Seven Chinese Brothers.
 Between the two I found word searches, a word jumble (unscramble) and some maps of China. HERE at Vaiden.net  is a downloadable story about the 5 Chinese Brothers that would be a good compare and contrast against The Seven Chinese Brothers too. Or HERE at Apples 4 the Teacher are some other fun printables for Chinese New Year.

I made The Seven Chinese Brothers Puppets for them to color and put on thick popsicle sticks to use  while we read the Reader’s Theater version of The Seven Chinese Brothers….It was lots of fun!

Another Book we read to Celebrate Chinese New Year is Sam and the Lucky Money.  A fun lesson plan to use with the great book about giving to those less fortunate than you is HERE.

We also read this book The Seven Chinese Sisters and compared and contrasted the two stories and what the sisters did in theirs versus what the brothers did in their story. In The Seven Chinese Sisters book there is a dragon that causes trouble.

For Chinese New Year we made DRAGONS to use in our first and second grade parade around the school.  We bring small gongs, cymbols, and drums and sing a song while carrying around these awesome dragons we created. HERE at Craft Jr.  is a link to a dragon puppet on chopsticks that is very pretty. 

I freehand drew a dragon head and we colored it and glued it on a red dragon outline…..

The body and tail are made from 1 foot by 4 foot of yellow butcher paper folded every 8 inches Then we added 2 foot length streamers to the tail….all colors of the rainbow….so pretty!

We decorated the heads with marker and glued them on the body of the Chinese Dragon Craft

Then we painted chinese lettering on our dragons and made paper decorations for them….

We cut 1/2 inch strips of  red, orange and yellow “fire” streamers and stapled them to the mouth….. Then we added Red, Yellow, Orange, Green, Blue  streamers to the tail in about 2 foot lengths stapled….

HERE is the Learning to GIVE link was a list of activities that I really loved too. Here was one I might have to use next week as we get ready for Valentines Day.

“Get out a giant piece of paper and, as a family, make the longest list you can of small ways to say “I like you” to family and friends. Here are some ideas to get you started: bring someone a cookie, rub Mom’s back, offer to weed your grandma’s garden, sweep the floor, bring Dad a drink of water, offer to play your sister’s favorite game, smile at your brother, etc.”