Tomorrow begins Chinese New Year!

We are from Singapore and currently living in California now. Being so far away from home, it is so important for me to try to cultivate the love for Chinese culture and language in my children through these celebrations.

To learn more about this important Chinese festival, I set up a Chinese New Year (CNY) theme learning shelf at home. It’s packed with many hands-on fun activities which you can make with stuffs or trash you have at home.



1. Chinese Zodiac Sign Stick Puppets and Egg Carton Puppet Stage

To make the puppets, print pictures of the 12 animals in the Chinese Zodiac and add popsicle sticks to the them. Then upcycle an egg carton into a puppet stage for the stick puppets.

This is fun for pretend play as we read the story of the animals racing to cross the river and checks off counting and Chinese names matching at the same time.



2. Red Packets Jigsaw Puzzles

It’s so easy to make any pictures into a puzzle by pasting them on a piece of cardboard and cutting them up into pieces.

We made these puzzles with red packets for our CNY theme shelf. For older children, you can cut the picture into smaller pieces to increase the difficulty.



3. Dot Stickers Color Matching Chinese Dragon

Dot stickers are my must-haves materials all the time. They are cheap, come in so many colors and sizes and you can use them for gazillion activities. Here’s one CNY theme activity using dot stickers as the dragon’s scales.

I drew colored circles on a cardboard dragon’s body and the kids pasted the dot stickers according to the colors.



4. Mandarin Oranges Sight Words Matching

I painted an egg carton orange to look like mandarin oranges. And my son matched the sightwords and put leaves (the applesauce pouch caps) on the oranges. Start collecting these pouch caps!

For more CNY learning ideas, check out the rest of the activities on our CNY theme learning shelf on my blog.

Here’s wishing everyone the most Happy and Prosperous New Year! 新年快乐，万事如意！