Chinese New Year

Have you ever celebrated the Chinese New Year?  Well this was our first time, but we had a blast!  There are lots of fun activities and crafts to do.  AND if I had planned better, we would have eaten chinese food - or at least had a fortune cookie.  However, I feel like we did it up right and learned a little in the process!  Here is how we celebrated. 
First we made a chinese firecracker.  My baby girl painted a toilet paper roll red and we intended to draw chinese symbols on it with a gold paint pen, however, we ended up just with a red toilet paper roll - yikes.  Still fun - painting is always a hit with a four year old!

Our next activity was to make chinese lanterns.  We simply followed the tutorial here.  It was a great cutting exercise for my girl.  And since C is for Cutting and China... we were Cool!

The last activity was a snake exercise - since this is the year of the snake.  I found a mask template here.  Printed it, and stapled ribbon to it.  We acted like snakes crawling around on our bellies, and made lots of ssssssssssilly sssssssssssssnake sssssssssssounds.

 I also had a ssssssspiral sssssssnake exercisssssssssse (what?  Too much?) for her to practice her cutting again.

 Throw in a little google images on the ipad - and our celebration was a hit.  I should also add that we did several countdowns (like you would for the new year - not sure if the chinese count it down, but hey... it was fun.) Practicing counting down from 5 then from 10.  It was a good exercise for her and she had a blast!  Like I said, next celebration we plan to have a little chinese food, and maybe some chop sticks :)