Chinese New Year Archives

Chinese Dragon Mask Printable Coloring Activity

January 3, 2021 By Deirdre

This Chinese Dragon mask will be fun to color and wear at any Chinese New Year celebration. Yes, 2021 is the year of the ox and not the dragon. (There is a cow mask that you can download right here on my blog if you like.) When many people think of Chinese New Year, they think of a Chinese dragon dancing down a parade route. What fun it would be to have your children decorate their own masks and create their own parade.

Getting the Dragon Mask

First, you will need to do is to download the Chinese Dragon Mask Coloring Printable.

Next, you will need to open it with a PDF reader. Acrobat Reader is a very popular one.

Finally, you will need to print it out on bright white cardstock. Most cardstock labeled white will have a slightly gray tint.

Preparing the Mask for Your Children

You can have your children cut out the mask before or after they decorate it. If you plan on cutting out the mask for them, you may want them to decorate the mask after it is cut out. Then you can attach the way they will wear it and they can wear it right away.

Deciding What Coloring Tools to Use

You can put out a variety of coloring tools for your children to use or choose just one. Below you will find a list of fun ways to color.

Magic Markers give the mask some texture. They also give you a brightly colored mask. The colors don’t fade much.
Crayons also give a mask texture. They aren’t messy and are easy to color over if you make a mistake. They don’t create bright vividly colored masks.
Color pencils give a mask a soft and fuzzy look. They aren’t messy!
Watercolors give the mask a sheer layer of color. They are messy and colors can run from one area of the mask to another. We used watercolors to paint this mask!

Wearing the Mask

There are a number of ways you can wear the mask.

First, you can punch holes on either side of the mask. Then you can attach yarn to both of the holes. You can tie the two pieces of yarn in the back.
Second, you can attach a strip of cardstock to both sides of the mask. Your children can then slip the mask over their heads.
Third, you may have children that don’t want to wear the mask on their face. You can attach a wooden craft stick to the mask. Children can hold the mask over their faces.

Here are some more masks available on my blog:

Bear Mask

If You Give a Mouse a Cookie Mask

Cute Shark Mask

There Was An Old Lady Printable Mask Template

Preschool Activities- Shape Sheep

January 16, 2015 By Deirdre

This shape sheep craft is one of those preschool activities that opens the door to explore shapes and gives you a cute end product. It would be great for a farm unit, The Year of the Sheep,a nursery rhyme unit or Easter.

In fact I think it would one of those preschool activities that would be fun to do after reading or singing the following rhymes:

Mary Had Little Lamb

Mary had a little lamb,
His fleece was white as snow,
And everywhere that Mary went,
The lamb was sure to go.

He followed her to school one day,
Which was against the rule,
It made the children laugh and play
To see a lamb at school.

And so the teacher turned it out,
But still it lingered near,
And waited patiently about,
Till Mary did appear.

“Why does the lamb love Mary so?”
The eager children cry.
“Why, Mary loves the lamb, you know.”
The teacher did reply.

Baa, Baa, Black Sheep

Baa, baa, black sheep,
Have you any wool?
Yes, sir, yes, sir,Three bags full;
One for the master,
And one for the dame,
And one for the little boy
Who lives down the lane.

What do you need to put the shape sheep together?

Shape pieces:

White circles
Long black rectangles
Black trapezoids
Small black circles
Large white ovals
Small white ovals
Small black squares

Non- Shape pieces:

Small white almond shapes (For the sheep’s ears)

Small pink almond shapes (For the sheep’s ears)

Putting the Sheep Together:

There are several approaches that can be taken when setting up preschool activities.

You can create a sample of what the final product might look like.
You can give each child a set of the shapes that could be used to create a shape sheep and leave it up to their imagination.
You could place the materials in a central spot and have children select what they will need to create a shape sheep.

There really isn’t a right or wrong way for this activity to be done. You know your children and how they best like to approach preschool activities and crafts. I tend to let my son see a final product and he tends to end up with a final product that looks very different from the sample. We end with two great crafts in the end that reflect our personalities!

Extending Preschool Activities Like The Shape Sheep

Children can be asked to count how many of each shape they have used.
They can be asked to create a find all the parts of the sheep that equal two.
Counting how many shapes their are with four sides would be fun too.

Here are some other preschool activities that can found on the blog:

Fall Preschool Activities

Five Little Apples Song and Craft

Color Activity- Sorting Ninja Turtles

If you do make a shape sheep of your own, please leave me a comment below telling me about it or share a picture of it on my Facebook page.

Paper Plate Crafts for Kids- Sheep

January 15, 2015 By Deirdre

I love to buy fun cup liners to liven up my son’s lunches. When I decided it would be fun to make a paper plate sheep, I found the perfect leftover liner to use for the sheep’s face. Why did we make sheep? JDaniel asked me just that question on the day we did this craft. We did this sheep craft along with several other sheep-themed activities for Chinese New Year. 2015 is the year of the sheep. At the end of this post, you will find a number of paper plate crafts we have done in the past.

This paper plate sheep craft used only seven crafting elements. They were the following:

The link below is an affiliate link.

Black Polka Dot Cupcake Liners
Cotton balls
Wiggly eyes
Black construction paper
Small paper plate
Glue
Scissors

How did we put this sheep craft together?

We started by covering the surface of the paper plate with glue. (You could use a glue stick for this craft, but the cotton balls didn’t stick as well when we tried using it.) Plus it was such fun squeezing the glue out and swirling it all over.

Then we filled the plate up with cotton balls. We found it easiest to start placing the cotton balls in the center of the plate and working our way out. When we needed to, we could nudge the inner cotton balls in a little to create a sheep with compact wool.

Next, we placed a cup liner face down (decorated side down) on the kitchen table. We fold the sides to form a triangle or cone shape. The pointy end of the triangle was folded up to create a flat surface. That end of the cupcake liner would become the area for the sheep’s nose. The liner was then turned over to the decorated side. We folder the pointed corners down in the front to create ears for the sheep.

We then glued wiggly eyes to the front of the cupcake liner. You could create eyes with white and black construction paper if you don’t have wiggly eyes available. With the eyes in place, we glued the sheep’s head onto the center of the cotton ball-covered plate.

All that was left was to cut out legs for the sheep out of construction paper. We ended up just cutting out rectangles. You may decide that you would like feet with hooves. I think they would look great on the sheep.

Here are some other paper plate crafts we have done:

Paddington Bear Paper Plate Craft

Ocean Animals Paper Plate Craft

Paper Plate Crafts- Lion and Lamb

Paper Plate Crafts- Patriotic Windsock

New Year’s Eve Countdown Ball

If you do make a paper plate sheep of your own, please leave me a comment below telling me about it or share a picture of it on my Facebook page.

Great Chinese New Year Activities for Kids

January 12, 2014 By Deirdre

I have some great Chinese New Year activities for kids to share with you. Chinese New Year is Friday, January 31st this year. It is one of those holidays we really enjoy celebrating at my house. I thought you might like to celebrate it too. This post shares fun meals and snacks. There are crafts and learning activities too. I am hoping there is something in this post that is calling out to you.Fun Meals and Snacks

We went to visit a Chinese market to search for fun and unique foods to try. JDaniel and I ended up selecting items for a chicken stir fry along with mango gelatin, rice cookies, and some tropical fruit. It was truly an adventure. If you have a Chinese market in your area, you may want to take your children to explore it. We found food items at ours that we would never have found at our local grocery store.

A roll of crescent rolls was all that was needed to create a crescent roll snake. A simple green dyed milk wash gave the snake his green tint.

We used to participate in a weekly link up called Muffin Tin Monday. A few years ago I created a green tortilla dragon lunch for a post called Muffin Tin Monday- Happy Chinese New Year!

Crafts

We used some old Easter eggs to thread together a snake for a post-Chinese New Year- Snake Activities.

This post also features dragon activities from No Time for Flashcards, Read-Set-Read, Kids Activities Blog, Carrots are Orange, Wildlife Fun 4 Kids, Baby Centre, The Imagination Tree, and 3 Dinosaurs. I was and am so thankful to those blogs for letting me share their creative ideas in this post.

Cupcake liners can be used to make really cute fortune cookies. We used bright red metallic cupcake liners for ours.We explored triangles, parallelograms, and squares while we created a Chinese shape snake. We used black paper to create on. It really helped the shapes in the snake pop.

Learning ActivitiesI gave JDaniel a print out displaying the animals that are a part of the Chines zodiac. He was asked to search the toy box and play bins in his room to find animals that matched the animals in the printout. We were both surprised to find all of them.(The second link below is an affiliate link.)

Moving yarn, straws and cotton with child friendly chopsticks was fun not only for JDaniel, but for my Sunday school class too. I place the materials into a sensory table at church and the kids loved transferring the items with chopsticks. We usedHog Wild Sticks chopsticks for this activity.

Deirdre Smith writes/owns JDaniel4’s Mom. After twenty years as a elementary school and technology resource teacher in Northern Virginia, she became a stay at home mom in upstate South Carolina. Her blog features ways she and her 5 year old are exploring learning, crafting, creating healthy meals and living life to its fullest. Deirdre can also be found on twitter as @jdaniel4smom and on her blog’s FB page. You can also check her out on Google+.

Chinese New Year Dragon Craft and Snack

January 23, 2012 By Deirdre

Today we are celebrating the Chinese New Year! It is the year of the dragon! I thought it would be fun to create a dragon lunch for JDaniel. Rather than make a scary dragon I made a fun dragon for his lunch. After sharing the lunch I made I will share some fun Chinese New Year dragon craft ideas you will just love.

Chinese Dragon Snack

We had such fun dyeing beige tortilla neon green and cutting them out with cookie cutters for this meal. If you prefer you can create the dragon using a spinach tortilla. It would eliminate the need to dye the beige tortilla and give your kids a vegetable serving too.

The dragon has a ham inner mouth and carrot tongue.The dragon’s eyes are black olives with corn pupils. I am not sure most dragons have crests on their heads, but this one has an American cheese crest.

Yes, that makes this ham and cheese sandwich with a few vegetables. JDaniel loves ham and cheese right now. This was a fun way to serve him some of his favorite foods.

Since New Year’s is usually celebrated with fireworks, I gave JDaniel red grape, red strawberry, and red grape tomato fireworks to have with his dragon.