Chinese New Year Lanterns

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Home : 2005 : February : 28

Chinese New Year Lanterns
By biz

You can make Chinese New Year Lanterns. They're pretty simple and look great. You take a red piece of construction paper and fold it in half. Then you cut about 10 1-inch slits in the half paper. Then you unfold it to full
size and re-fold it into a cylinder shape (without a top or bottom) and staple it together. The last step is to staple on a yellow handle. There are probably better instructions for these online.
Demi has some fiction books with Chinese themes/characters. You can photocopy some of the pictures of dragons or phoenixs and have the kids either color them or make them "glitter." We had

them trace the picture on plastic wrap with a black sharpie and then color it in with colored sharpies. We then taped this onto a piece of construction paper covered in tin foil. They look really great but take a couple of days.

I've had students make a Chinese New Year Dragon out of cereal boxes as well. You can have them each bring in a cereal box (or some sort of box about that size). You cover it in construction paper and glue on tissue paper and decorations (sequins, puff balls, etc.). You then line up the boxes on a bookshelf or on top of a cupboard to make the whole dragon. It looks really cool b/c each segment looks different so the whole thing is really bright and colorful.

You could make Chinese fans in a similar way with pictures of dragons or Chinese symbols.

If you're in the older grades you could do a timeline of the immigration of the Chinese to the US. The book Coolies by Yin is really great.

Animal and flower symbols are also really important in China. You could have kids research different animal meanings (Phoenix, Dragon, Lotus flower, etc.)

That's all I can think of - have fun!!! What a neat project!

I don't know how to spell it properly but Ni hao (knee how) is Mandarin for Hello and She-she (sh - a, sh - a with a long a sound) is thank you.