School-Age Special Event: Lunar New Year

In our Fall and Spring sessions, we usually do a special event once a month. The special event for January was celebrating the Lunar New Year.

1. Reading:
We read the book "Bringing in the New Year" by Grace Lin. It's a fairly new book about the Chinese New Year and had some wonderful information in the back of the book about some common traditions that many families and communities have to celebrate.

2. Discussion

I had a very short discussion after I read the book, where I read the information at the back of "Bringing in the New Year" by Grace Lin. I talked about some of the crafts we had planned and how they related to the celebrations many people had surrounding the Lunar New Year.

3. Crafts

We had not one, not two, not even three crafts...we had FOUR crafts. I set up four stations for the kids to visit. At some of our other special events, it has worked well to have a 'passport' where the kids earn stamps by completing the activity or craft at each station. I made a passport for our program that had each craft.

The signs for the stations:

3a. Chinese Lantern:

We took red paper, folded it in half longways, and cut up the middle but not all the way through. Then we taped the ends of the paper to make a tube with the slits poking out to make a lantern. The kids were able to choose the yarn they wanted as their handle to the lantern. Fancier versions of how to make the craft can be found here and here. 

3b. Chinese Dragon

I based our dragon craft on a version I found online. There was no template for it, so I had teen volunteers cut strips of colorful paper. Parents and teen helpers helped the kids make chains of paper for their dragon bodies. As for the heads, I made a template on Publisher using the oval shapes and had teens cut them out.

3c. Bookmarks

It is customary to write wishes and poems on red paper to hang up for the New Year. I had small pieces of red paper cut out and kids could color and write their wishes for the New Year. If they wanted, they could use their paper wishes as bookmarks for their books.

3d. Learn to write Chinese characters

I found some neat worksheets for kids learning how to write Chinese characters. I posted them up on the wall above one of the stations and had paper that the kids could use to practice writing the characters. Another poster from a different website taught the numbers 1 through 10 in Chinese. 

How did it go?

All in all, I think it was a pretty successful program. We had between 40-50 people at the program. It was busy and hectic, but a lot of fun. There are definitely things I would do differently next time. A lot of the crafts needed tape or glue and it is harder to do those with that many kids and at stations where kids need to move through them quickly. Otherwise, all the kids and their parents seemed to have had a wonderful time!