The Year of the Tiger is finally upon us, and I know we are all hoping it will bring some much needed positivity, hope, and happiness to all of us! We decided to take a week to learn more about Lunar New Year and some of its traditions, using the wonderful story, Ruby’s Wish, as a base! Here are the Lunar New Year activities we did to celebrate!
Written by Shirin Yim Leos (formerly Bridges) and illustrated by the wonderful Sophie Blackall, Ruby’s Wish is the true story of Shirin’s grandmother, who was determined to break tradition and become one of the first female students to attend university in China. It’s uplifting and a beautifully written story that we enjoyed very much. This story does talk about celebrating Chinese New Year. In fact, the end of the story is Ruby receiving an acceptance letter to a university in her red envelope, so it was the perfect book to tie in to our Lunar New Year mini unit!
Many, many moons ago I taught multiage, and it was some of the most fun I’ve ever had teaching. We “traveled” around the world and so I collected quite a bit of items from different countries. One of the countries we learned about was China, so I already had some things I used to decorate my classroom back then including a large paper dragon and red lanterns, so I taped them to the ceiling to add some fun for our unit! I also had many posters that I placed around our little learning space.
I made sure to have some extra books about Chinese culture displayed on our shelves to explore in our free time.
Our story covered topics such as character traits, possessive nouns, vocabulary, and also covered some inference. We did some normal activities with these that went along with Ruby’s Wish.
To practice paragraph building and organization we did this fun paragraph dragon puppet that I got from Scholastic’s Writing Skills Made Fun: Sentence and Paragraphs. You cut out the pieces and have to put the sentences in order to make a solid paragraph. We taped the ends to pens so we could dance it around like a dragon puppet in a parade. My students always loved doing this and so did my son!
To learn about Lunar New Year, we first watched this animated video and then this one that showed real celebrations of the holiday.
We also talked about what Chinese zodiac animal we are and my son was so excited to learn that his was a dragon! (Dragons are his most favorite thing at the moment, so it was quite perfect.) He also thought it was hilarious that his brother’s is a pig and had to tell him that multiple times. Ha! We used a poster I got years ago that explained each one and it worked out great.
We learned about Chinese calligraphy by watching this video and then reading more about it in this awesome resource from Chalk Academy. Betty, the creator of Chalk Academy, is a second-generation Chinese American and provides a multitude of resources and tips for everything from parenting to learning Chinese. Her resource for the red envelopes includes information about Chinese calligraphy and style, as well as templates to make and decorate red envelopes for Lunar New Year at home. We had fun decorating ours and my son wrote a couple of nice notes to his brother and father to place inside.
I made one for him as well!
We had fun with these Lunar New Year activities and are welcoming this new year with open arms!
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