Thinking Thursdays: I spy, CNY!

Recently, our bible study group mate sent us a bunch of yummies for Chinese New Year, and those were quickly finished. Mainly by me (oops), and now we don't have any goodies for Chinese New Year itself! However, its is no biggie, since its going to be a really quiet CNY over here.

Anyway, we were left with this plastic container, and I decided to do an "I Spy" jar for Junior J (we did those filled with rice previously in this post). 

I realized that we have quite a few photographs (from the blog) on Chinese New Year, so I compiled some to represent some of the common practices for CNY (you can get the printable here!):

Then I topped the jar with random fillers like ribbons, confetti, bits of cut up red paper:

And now Junior J has his own "I, Spy, CNY!" jar...

... that even has him in it!

Here are the photos, which you can print and use in your own CNY jar (save the photo first, or open it in another browser window). Perhaps it might keep the kids busy during the long bus/car/train rides when they are out visiting!

Happy Chinese New Year in advance, and we'll be back next week, hopefully with a Valentine's day craft to share!

Monday Made: Our Chinese New Year Lapbook

We've been learning more about Chinese New Year and the Zodiac calendar last week, and made another lapbook! Again, we recycled book depository packaging, and covered the front with white paper. The boy has been experimenting with Blopens (these pens that allow you to blow ink out through them), and we used a dragon stencil to decorate the cover.

And here's the inside of the lapbook:

We learnt about the Chinese Zodiac, by reading a book ("The Great Race", by Dawn Casey) and watching two videos on the topic ("Chinese Zodiac Story", as well as part of Vol 3 from the Taoshu DVDs).

Then the boy pasted the animals (printed from here) to their correct names in English, and then he learnt their names in Chinese and pasted those down too. (You can get the name printables from our FB page!)

He then had fun spinning the zodiac wheel (from here) to figure out the years in which each family member was born (the years are pretty small so I guided him a little):

We then filled in a little flipbook with the details of each family member (you can print out the arrow for the zodiac wheel as well as the text for the flipbook using our printable), and also added photos for each member too!

And finally, we did a little snake to fill up the space next to the zodiac wheel, since it was going to be the year of the snake! Junior J did some messing around with paints, then added the tongue, eyes and scales when the paint was dry. :)

I'm planning to let Junior J take a couple of photos of various CNY traditions when the time comes (eg. receiving red packets), and we'll slot those photos into the red packet that we stuck in the lapbook!