We love to celebrate as many holidays and celebrations from around the world as possible in our classroom. Chinese New Year is one of our favourite celebrations – mainly because we have a Chinese buffet to chase lots of amazing food! The students over the years have got more and more brave, sniffing, licking – and some even tasting the different foods!
As with all holidays, we like to make crafts to go along with the theme. This time we’ve made 4 different Chinese New Year crafts that I’d love to share with you! Find them below.
Handprint Chinese Dragon
This dragon was a lot of fun to make together. First, we googled a dragon colouring page. We printed it and cut out the heads and legs. The children coloured these in. Next, we done some paint hand prints. My students love painting with their hands, so we knew this would go down well. We had each student make a handprint in 4 different colours. We left them dry and them cut out around them. Then, we stuck it all down onto a piece of card. The finished product is this amazing handprint Chinese dragon!
Chinese Dragon Mask
My students are really starting to enjoy taking part in role play activities. So when we make crafts now, we try to make things that they can use as well. This is when we decided to make a Chinese dragon mask. This is actually a pretty easy activity to do together.
First, we googled for a Chinese dragon colouring page. We printed it, and cut out the face. Next, we used bingo daubers to decorate the face of the dragon. Staff members used hole punchers to cut out eyes of the mask – my students aren’t quite ready to do that independently yet. To finish off, we cut strips of red and yellow tissue paper and stapled them to the bottom of the mask.
Chinese Dragon Paper Plate
I don’t know about you, but we love to make crafts out of paper plates! This one is pretty easy too. First, staff cut out some of the middle of the paper plate in the shape of the eyes so that it could be folded up to be 3D – see in photo.
Next, we got our students to paint the paper plate red. We left it to dry overnight to make sure it was pure dry. The next day, we added all the decorations that you can see. The white paint blobs around the edges just added something extra to the craft.
Chinese Handprint Dragon
This was a bit of a messy craft activity, but my students had a blast! We had red, green and white paint out and some googly eyes. Then, we got the students to press their hands into the red paint and then place them into a Chinese dragon shape – this did need some support from staff. We also pre-made one (staff) to have on show for our students to look at, so they could see what they were making. Then, we used our fingers to paint some green
Will you be celebrating Chinese New Year in your classroom? Do you make any crafts? Let me know, I’d love to hear from you! You can find some great Chinese New Year activities here.
