A week with Chinese New Year!

Thursday is Chinese New Year!  So this week we are learning a bit about China and their culture and beliefs about a new year.  This is the year of the goat, so our letter is Gg.

Journal Time - The kiddos used red (lucky color in China) markers in their journals today.  They also munch a fortune cookie or two and watched some dragon and lion dancing.  Cool stuff.

Paint Dryer - Ms. Sara found this awesome laundry hanger at Ikea ... perfect for drying paint pictures!  I hung it down low so the kiddos could pin their own pictures.

Beading Good Fortune - I set out red and gold beads for kiddos to make good fortune necklaces. 

Good Fortune Collage - The kiddos created a collage using red and gold items.  It turns out "red violet" paint is closer to magenta then red.  Ha.

Snack - We enjoyed Raumen noodles with chopsticks and a few other treats I found at the Asian market...

Class Visitor - A kiddo's mom came into class to share some of her Chinese culture with us.  She told us the story of why red and gold are lucky colors and why we bang pots and make noise as the new year begins.  She also shared a beautiful red banner with New Year wishes on it and red envelopes with real lucky money!  Thanks so much!

Chinese Slat Book - The first books created by the Chinese people were slat books, they tied wood pieces together and then folded the book up for storage.  They wrote down each slat instead of across like a page.

The kiddos enjoyed the chance to create a story.  They could use Chinese characters for writing or draw pictures.

The book (above) was about pirates, the book (below) was about a girl and her mother.

A couple of the boys were super excited to create a ninja book.  Here is our new ninja book that they followed...

The book (above) followed the story of the ninja book.  He had me write in text as he drew the pictures.  The book (below), you can see he was writing text and then had me add some more for him.

As you can guess, we worked quite a long time on our slat books.  I was pleased with the kiddo's interest and hard work.

I got the idea for the slat book from:  this source.

Collage Dragons - We looked at some pictures of Chinese dragons, then we created our own.

 I got this idea from:  this source.