Chinese New Year activities

We have really enjoyed our Chinese New Year themed activities this week. We started by looking at China in our atlas and flag book and finding the correct flag sticker. We found that China is in Asia and the capital is Beijing. We read a fact book from the library too and Harry liked the following facts:

- Giant pandas live in China
- Chinese people eat with chopsticks
- Rice is grown in China
- Lots of bikes are made in China

We made our own Chinese flag from shiny red paper and gold stars. Harry's stars went a bit wobbly but he did well drawing round the biscuit cutter and cutting them out himself.

We watched an episode of The Lingo Show on YouTube featuring mandarin and learned to say 'Ni hao' (hello). We also watched some videos of Chinese New Year dragon and lion dances.

We used some activity sheets from activity village and enjoyed themed colouring sheets and mazes. We did a wordsearch featuring the animals of the Chinese zodiac, and coloured all the animals.

Harry has really liked the story of how the years of the Chinese calendar got their names. We used these books from the library, featuring the story of a great race between the animals of the kingdom. We spent a lot of time at the end thinking about which year people in our family were born in.

We wrote an acrostic poem using the word SNAKE, for the year of the snake. Harry did really well thinking of suitable words, using the colouring sheet pictures and the books as prompts. We also looked in the dictionary for K words and decided on Kind.

We made some Chinese fans using folded sheets of paper and the boys had fun hiding behind them and using them for dancing. Harry decorated his bedroom with them.

We visited the Centre for Life this week and one of the activity tables was a Chinese dragon craft, which we followed the instructions to make. The flexible body is made by placing the ends of two long strips of paper at a right angle on top of each other and folding them over each other until you reach the other end. We cut out a head and tail and taped lolly sticks to each end to create our 'dancing' dragon. Peter's didn't last long unfortunately - he had an irresistable urge to rip it apart but seemed to enjoy doing so! 

Harry enjoyed doing some traditional tangram puzzles using seven shapes to fill a space to make an image.

We also made some spiral snakes to hang up. Harry drew and cut out his own spirals.

And of course we sampled some Chinese food for lunch one day! Duck spring rolls, noodles and sweet and sour chicken.