Happy Chinese New Year!!

Gung hay fat choy. (I wish you good luck and happiness.) Today is the first day of the Chinese New Year. 2013 is the year of the snake. Here are some ideas that we are doing to celebrate.

Dragon Parade by Steven A. Chin is a wonderful picture book about a Chinese man who moves to San Francisco and opens a grocery store. It is based on a true story about how he brought San Francisco a large celebration for the Chinese New Year including the first dragon parade in the Land of the Golden Mountain (America).

I posted earlier in the week about the Chinese instruments we made. With these instruments we will make some noise to scare away the evil spirits and parade around the house. There is also a link to Daria's giveaway of beautiful tingsha hand bells.

We will also have a dragon parade and lion dancers at our parade with our homemade puppets. The top one is the dragon and the bottom three are the lion dancer (each view).  The dragon puppet idea came from Enchanted Learning. The lion dancer puppet came from Activity Village. I wish I had used larger pieces of construction paper for the middle part of this one. Hazel loves them. She gave the lion dancer orange eyes, so they are a bit hard to see on the front.

Then we decorated the dining room. I saw the snake cut-out at Activity Village (the snake coloring page next to it is from there as well since it was the model of the snake for the cut-out). The dragon is also from that page since they used it as a pattern for a paper cut craft. I decided after doing my snake, to stop there with the cut crafts. The other snake coloring page is also from Activity Village but a different page. The snake mobile which we used as a decoration for our chandelier instead of being a mobile also came from Activity Village.

Then we made a Chinese themed dinner. We used the two Chinese recipes from The Kids Multicultural Cookbook. We made a ginger honey chicken wings recipe and a peanut noodle recipe. Then of course we ate them with some green beans with soy sauce on them and ate with chopsticks. We are hoping to make some fortune cookies later today or this week. The snow removal has taken up much of our time so we have not gotten to as much as we hoped.

Finally, I made Hazel some simple felt dumplings and felt fortune cookies. I found some simple fortunes on-line and printed them out and then followed the tutorials on Kaboose. I did not use hot glue for either and did not find they took long. In fact I'm hoping to have Hazel make a few herself. For the dumplings I gathered them up for a minute or two to make the fluted edge. I used a clothespin for the fortune cookies to get their shape. If we make more, I'll take some pictures and provide you a bit of a tutorial on how we did it.

How are you celebrating the Chinese New Year?