Books and Activities to make this the Best Chinese New Year

Happy New Year everyone!  While Chinese New Year doesn't begin until February 5th, we teachers like to start early to gather books and materials - so I thought I'd share some of my favorites!

This Next New Year, by Janet S. Wong:  (links for your convenience, I am not an amazon affiliate).

I like this book for several reasons.  First, it's told from the perspective of a young boy, and is simply told.  Many Chinese New Year preparations and traditions are explained by him, so young children will easily understand them.  I think it's also important that the narrator talks about people from different cultures celebrating lunar new year - this holiday isn't limited to China!

 Dragon Dancing, by Carole Lexa Schaefer:

 Dragon Dancing is also told from the perspective of a young child.  A beautifully diverse school group learns about dragons, then creates their own dragon in art class.  They work together to dance their dragon all over, imagining it's actions through various settings.  This book really sets the stage for imagining and mimicking dragon actions, and is likely to inspire children to cooperate to make their own dragon.  This book absolutely begs for participation from readers!

The Runaway Wok by Ying Chang Compestine

This story is longer than the other two, but the fast pace will keep children listening!  This one has elements of Jack and the Beanstalk and the Gingerbread Man, but is a very different story.  The emphasis is on sharing and being fair, something children usually have strong feelings about.  It talks about Chinese New Year foods and activities, and has a satisfying moral at the end.  If you are able to follow up by serving traditional foods and showing children a real wok, they'll be fascinated! 


My very favorite activity to do for Chinese New Year is tangrams, an ancient Chinese puzzle with unlimited possible answers.  Tangrams look deceptively easy: the puzzle is made up of only 7 simple shapes, but even adults often struggle to make a basic square with them!

Working on spacial awareness, and manipulating 2D shapes are important mathematical concepts, so I like to offer my students both the challenge, and an option to get clues, so they can choose the right level of difficulty for themselves.  Check out this short video explanation:

 If you'd like to use my tangram puzzles, you can find them in my TeachersPayTeachers store here.

There are a couple of lovely story books about tangrams: Grandfather Tang's Story, and The Tangram Magician are both great for introducing the puzzles, and using literature to bring math into your classroom!

I've written before about Chinese New Year sensory bins, painting, and the story of the Great Race, and about making a Chinese New Year dragon blower, today I'd also like to share how to make an egg carton dragon.


 Egg Carton Dragon
You'll need half of the bottom of an egg carton, red paint and a brush, scissors, pipe cleaners, wiggle eyes and glue, and a push pin:

 Paint the egg carton red:

 When it is dry, use the push pin to poke holes for the pipe cleaners to stick out of the dragon's head.  Glue on wiggle eyes.  If desired, use a marker to add facial features!  You can also use yellow, orange and red paper scraps to help your dragon breath fire, or add sequins to  make it sparkle.

Next time I'll talk about fun ideas that are specific to celebrating the Year of the Pig.  Please follow my blog to be notified when new posts are ready.  Until then, Happy New Year!

These Awesome Tangrams Will Make Your Students LOVE math!

You're probably familiar with tangrams, the Chinese puzzle made with 7 shapes that form a square - and any number of other things.  They're fun for all ages, simple enough for a child to use, and complex enough to challenge adults: truly a puzzle for children ages 3 - 103.

When I first introduce anything to my students, I like to allow them plenty of time to explore and discover on their own.  This is something I was urged to do way back in teacher training, and 25 years teaching has reinforced.  It's amazing what students will come up with when you let them explore and play!

Next I display a big tangram shape.  I ask students to tell me what they notice.  This is when I usually hear the names of the shapes, some words about size, and there's almost always someone who refers to the "diamond" shape, which is just the square turned onto a corner.  Being a tiny bit silly (who me?) I ask the children what my name is - Ms. Paula.  I then strike various silly poses and ask again - and each time my name is still the same.  It's the same with the square - turn it any which way you like, it's still a square!

Another great word and concept that comes up at this time is parallel.  For most of the children I've taught, that's a new word.  We look around the room for things that are parallel: the sides of our desks, the lines in the ceiling tiles, bookshelves, and more.  Although this is a brief mini lesson, only lasting a minute or so, I carry it over into the rest of the week by noticing or asking children to notice parallel lines around the school.  Pretty soon they have that concept firmly in place.

The next thing I like to do is to hide my tangram, and provide each child with their own tangram and ask then to make me a square.  I bet you can picture which child in your class will be a smarty and hold up the small square!

I challenge them to make a square, and it doesn't take long for someone to use 2 equal sized triangles to do it.  The tangram set includes 2 small triangles and 2 big triangles, so there's more than 1 way to do it - I love telling my students to keep trying and look for another way, it's just the sort of challenge they're eager to figure out!

It's very rare to have a student use all 7 pieces to make a square, in fact, most adults I've met can't figure it out.  I give the children a few minutes to try, and when I sense they're ready, I begin to give them clues.  I show them how to use the 2 big triangles to make half of the square - it's helpful to define the space where the rest of the pieces will go.

A few minutes later I add the square,

then the medium triangle. 

Eventually all the children get it.

That's my introduction to tangrams - next comes the part I like the best!  I show students pictures that can be made with tangrams, and challenge them to try to make them.  You can find hundreds of tangram puzzle shapes with a quick internet search, or for simplicity, I have a variety of these puzzles available in my TeachersPayTeachers store.

It's ideal to have both the puzzle and the answer key available, because many students will be challenged to simply rotate and match the shapes, while others will relish the challenge of figuring it all out.  I put them back to back in a page protector, so students can easily flip and check.

Don't have tangrams in your classroom yet, and don't have a budget for them?  No problem!  Download this free print

out, and either cut them ahead of time, or have students cut out their own.  It will save you a lot of confusion if you print them on different colored paper, so students don't mix up their pieces with a neighbor!  5-6 colors is enough - just use what you have available.

I hope you and your students enjoy exploring tangrams together! 

Celebrating Chinese New Year

Kung Hei Fat Choi  -  Wishing you all a prosperous new year!

We celebrated Chinese New Year at story time this week, and as usual, we had a blast!

I got to lead story time, which is sooooo much fun!  I love reading to the little ones, and singing and dancing, and did I mention all the fun things we get to do afterwards?  While I'm sure some people think I'm doing this as an act of volunteerism, I have to admit that getting to hang out and play with small people is an absolute treat for me.

I put together some props to use while retelling the story of the Great Race - the story of how the years of the Chinese Zodiac were named for 12 animals. 

We started with the animals lined up on one side of the felt board, and as I told the story I moved each animal across.  The children helped me figure out which number each animal was, and I put up the numbered cards across the top.  (This modeled the left to right progression of our writing, as well as numerical order - but all the children saw was a fun activity.)  Can you see the dragon puppets flying by the animals in the lower right hand corner?  One of our guests really loved the shiny dragons.

How about these for shiny dragons!?  One of our sensory bins had golden dragons, red tinsel, gold coins, red envelopes, and some other shiny shapes hidden in it. 

Here's our other sensory bin: pompons with jewels, tongs and clothes pins to work those fine motor skills.

Here it is in action:

Those little fingers are working hard, developing muscles that will later help these children to hold pencils as they learn to write.

Block play helps build hand muscles too, while also working on spacial skills, balancing, and learning about 3 dimensional shapes (with an occasional lesson in gravity thrown in for good measure!)

Painting our dragon scenes was very popular this week, as friends used sparkly paint to create a background, and added dragons on top. At least, that's what I thought was the plan, but as usual the children took the materials furthar and in different ways than we poor adults can hope to imagine: beautiful silhouettes!

I was surprised to see that the favorite center this week was actually the tangrams!  This set of 7 shapes can be formed into a square, or any number of other creations.  I read a wonderful book, The Tangram Magician by Lisa Campbell Ernst (no, I'm not affiliated with any book sellers, the link is just for your convenience).  In the story a magician transforms himself into different animals and objects, which are all represented with tangrams.  The kiddos LOVED it!  I put out tangram patterns of all 12 animals of the Zodiac that I made, plus enough paper tangrams for everyone to make their own creation - and they did!

Here's our graph that we made to show which activities each child liked best.  We looked at last week's graph, and introduced some great mathematical language: more, less, most, least.  Graphing their favorites is an easy way to introduce graphing, and all the math skills it entails - and it gives us great feedback that we can use as we plan future activities.

Each child went home with a red envelope with a nickel in it (red envelopes with money are a traditional New Year gift), and one of our families brought in delicious New Year cakes that she made for everyone.

 It looks like a very good new year indeed!

For more Chinese New Year activities, please see my Chinese New Year Pinterest board, and see this post from a previous celebration.

Chinese New Year dragon blower

Last year I found a really cute Chinese New Year's dragon craft, and tried it out with the kiddos.  I found it via Pinterest.com, at two different sites: http://blog.kangarooboo.com/2011/01/ and http://babyccinokids.com/blog/2012/02/14/fire-breathing-dragons/. The children really enjoyed it, and got quite a fine motor workout making their dragon!  As a bonus feature, blowing through the dragons is a deep breathing and calming activity - something most teachers of  3 - 5 years olds will welcome!

This project was completed over a couple of days, as we had to paint the cardboard tubes and then let them dry completely before decorating them.

 I helped hold the rolls still while the children put on two large spots of glue at one end, added pompoms, and then clipped a peg on to hold them in place while they dried.  We added wiggly eyes very carefully!

 Clothes pins provide a great finger workout for little hands!  We repeated the process on the other end of the tube (minus the wiggly eyes), to make large "nostrils" for our dragons.

 We taped some tissue paper streamers inside the mouth end, and let them dry.  It's so hard to wait!

The next morning we were able to enjoy our dragons!  We discovered through trial and error that when the children put the tube right up against their mouths, the tissue paper didn't move much, but look at it go when we pursed our lips and blew from a short distance back!

 I think these dragons will scare off any evil spirits that may be lurking around! 

 I will admit, this was not the children's favorite activity for Chinese New Year.  I bought some special red envelopes, and followed the Chinese new year tradition of giving money.   I only put a quarter in each envelope, and the children had to tell me "Gung Hay Fat Choy," which means Happy New Year, in order to collect their envelopes.  Would you believe, they all really liked that best?!   They also liked the ginger chicken stir fry and rice that we had with lunch... and the fortune cookies.  (They're smart kids!)

For those of you who are working on sight word reading, and want a fun reading activity for Chinese New Year, here's a link to a fun activity I created recently.  I hope you like it!

Gung Hay Fat Choy!  Happy Chinese New Year!