Celebrating Chinese New Year with Crafts

I like celebrating the holidays in my classroom.  I wanted to share 2 crafts that we tackled yesterday for the beginning of Chinese New Year.  Felt Fortune Cookies and Paper Lanterns - both fun and both super easy.

For fortune cookies the kids received a square piece of felt with a traced circle (6 circles could fit onto a single sheet of felt).  As they were working on morning work I passed out the circles and they could cut them out.  A room mom hot glued the pipe cleaner onto the center.  When everyone's circle was cool, we folded them like a taco, and then folded them into the proper shape.  Easy peasy.  I passed out the individually wrapped fortune cookies (Winco had them for 7 cents each), and the kids could study their shape, then we broke them open and shared the fortunes out loud.  Some years I have the kids create their own fortunes, this year there was NO TIME and we put the already made fortune into their felt creations to take home.  

The kids have been working hard on their writing, so making a paper lantern was a big motivator for them to finish up!  The kids picked up a piece of card stock (their color choice) and folded it horizontally (hot dog).  They made some cuts from the fold to the top edge, leaving room for a border.  Along the border the kids could write Chinese New Year, draw symbols and characters, etc., then I stapled them together.  The kids wrote their names on the handles.

So, all in all, 2 easy crafts that packed a punch with the kids yesterday!

Happy Chinese New Year

Today we celebrated Chinese New Year in the classroom.  We worked with paper Tanagrams to create pictures, we had a discussion that my kiddos were goats and monkeys (makes total sense), we played a Boggle game, and completed a word search.  We watched the Brainpop video about "New Years".  Then we had art... oh, we had art!

Felt Fortune Cookies:

My parent helper had traced a class set of circles onto light brown felt.  She cut them into little squares, and the kids cut them out  

Then they came over to me where I had precut pipe cleaners to fit the diameter of the circles.

I hot glued them on, and then we waited for them to cool.  When we were waiting (which wasn't long), I passed out the class set of fortune cookies, and they noticed the shape.  Then together we took the felt circles, folded them like a taco, and twisted into the fortune cookie shape.  

At the end of the day we completed another art project - Paper Lanterns.  After showing them how to make it, I had them repeat back the directions to me while I wrote them on the board.  Don't you love my visual directions... :)    

They came out super cute - of course I sent them all home before I remembered that I needed a picture.  

I hope you had a good day - I'm exhausted!