Chinese New Year 2014

Chinese New Year is coming up on January 31st, and here are a few activities you can do with your kids (these are what we did last year for this holiday):

Chinese New Year Crafts and Activities

• We made our own Happy New Year signs by coloring these Chinese character coloring pages and then cutting them out and gluing them on red paper (The color red is common for the Chinese New Year because it is associated with happiness and luck).

• We dressed up in Chinese clothes and my son built a "Great Wall of China" out of boxes (this was all his idea!)

• We made our own lucky new year coins (once again, my 5-year-old came up with this craft all on his own) to fill the red envelopes that my kids received from our local librarian. I gave my kids blank circles to decorate and cut out. I made larger circles for my younger son. Cutting out the circles was definitely good fine motor practice for both of my kids.

• We watched the following History Channel video about the Chinese New Year:

Chinese New Year Books

We read some thematic books. Here are a few of our favorites

My First Chinese New Year  by Karen Katz

This is a very simple book about a child's experience for Chinese New Year. It is a great introduction to the holiday.

Red Is a Dragon: A Book of Colors  by Roseanne Thong and Grace Lin

This isn't necessarily a Chinese New Year story, but it features illustrations of Chinese children and all of the colors of the rainbow. A few new vocabulary words were also introduced to my children.

Lucky New Year!  by Mary Man-Kong

The lift-a-flaps and pop-ups in this book made it especially fun for my two-year-old. My older boys enjoyed it as well.

Chinese New Year Meal

According to some of the books we read, tangerines and Oranges are a common food for the Chinese New Year because they symbolize luck and wealth. So for our Chinese New Year dinner, we made orange chicken. I am sure this recipe is not authentic at all, but we still enjoyed it!

Orange Chicken

(Serves 4)

Sauce:

• 1 1/2 cups water
•  2 tablespoons orange juice
•  1/4 cup lemon juice
•  1/3 cup rice vinegar
•  2 1/2 tablespoons soy sauce
•  1 tablespoon grated orange zest
•  1 cup packed brown sugar
•  1/2 teaspoon minced fresh ginger root (if you don't have fresh ginger, you can use ground ginger)
•  1/2 teaspoon minced garlic
•  2 tablespoons chopped green onion
•  1/4 teaspoon red pepper flakes
•   3 tablespoons cornstarch
•  2 tablespoons water

Chicken:

•  2 boneless, skinless chicken breasts, cut into 1/2 inch pieces
•  1 cup all-purpose flour
•  1/4 teaspoon salt
•  1/4 teaspoon pepper
•  3 tablespoons olive oil

Directions:

• Pour 1 1/2 cups water, orange juice, lemon juice, rice vinegar, and soy sauce into a saucepan and set over medium-high heat. Stir in the orange zest, brown sugar, ginger, garlic, chopped onion, and red pepper flakes. Bring to a boil. Mix together the cornstarch and 2 tablespoons water; stir into the sauce. Reduce heat to medium low and simmer at least 5 minutes, stirring occasionally.
• Meanwhile, in a resealable plastic bag, mix the flour, salt, and pepper. Add the chicken pieces, seal the bag, and shake to coat.
• Heat the olive oil in a large skillet over medium heat. Place chicken into the skillet, and brown on both sides.
• Serve chicken over rice with orange sauce on top.

If you want to add to the flavor you can also prepare the sauce without the cornstarch and water mixture and reserve 1 cup of that sauce to marinate the chicken in for 2 hours. Then, after marinating the chicken, you can coat the chicken with the flour mixture and cook it in the skillet while you add the cornstarch to the remainder of the sauce to thicken it to serve on top of the chicken. I usually never plan enough in advance to actually marinate the meat, but it can add to the taste!

Check out our previous Chinese New Year activities and my Chinese New Year Pinterest Board for more ideas!

Chinese New Year Crafts, Books, and Activities for Kids

The Chinese Lunar New Year is this coming Sunday, February 10th. This is a big holiday for many of my kids' friends, and though we aren't Chinese ourselves, we still like to get in on some of the fun.

Last year, we had a lot of fun reading books, doing crafts, and playing pretend for this holiday.

Crafts and Pretend Play

On cardstock paper, I printed out one copy of this template for a miniature Chinese takeout box for each of my children. I gave my children stamps and a stamp pad decorate their boxes (though you could have your kids decorate with markers, paints, stickers, or whatever you want). When they finished decorating their boxes, I cut them out and assembled them into three-dimensional take out boxes.

We filled our homemade fortune cookie boxes with these simple felt fortune cookies that I had made following an easy tutorial. Then, we added the completed take out box and cookies to our play kitchen for some fun pretend play.

It is also fun to do a thematic craft based on the Chinese calendar animal for the year. The year 2013 is the year of the snake. We made these egg carton "dragons" last year--but they could just as easily be "snakes" for a craft this year. To create these, I cut up pieces of an egg carton for the bodies. The kids painted the egg cartons as they desired. Then, I cut out one more slot from an egg carton for each head and the kids painted that as well. We glued googly eyes and a red tongue onto each head and then attached the heads to the bodies to complete the effect. The kids loved moving these crafts around and playing make believe with them after they dried.

We also dressed up in some Chinese costumes we had (they were actually brought to us from China from our grandmother many years ago).

Field Trips

For a related field trip if you are in the LA area, I strongly recommend the Autry Museum of the American West. It has a hands-on exhibit for children about Chinese Americans that includes an early 1900s Chinese American home, dress ups, masks, a play Chinese restaurant, and more. That museum is free to the public the second Tuesday of every month.

Also, the Pacific Asia Museum is free to all on the 4th Friday of each month and my kids loved that as well!

 Books and Stories

I told my children the story of the Chinese Zodiac, and we all checked our birth dates to see which animal we were based on the year we each were born.

We also read some picture books about the Chinese New Year that we picked up from our local library. One of those was Bringing in the New Year  by Grace Lin. It was a great book for little ones. It has simple, short text and bright illustrations that show the Chinese New Year celebration through the eyes of a child. A few end pages give some fun informational facts about Chinese New Year.

Chinese New Year Dates

Because the Chinese New Year is based on a lunar calendar, the corresponding date on our Western calendar changes from year to year. Here are the dates for the Chinese New Year in future years:

Chinese New Year 2013: February 10, 2013
Chinese New Year 2014: January 31, 2014
Chinese New Year 2015: February 19, 2015
Chinese New Year 2016: February 8, 2016

I hope you all have a lots of fun celebrating this year! Be sure to also check out my Chinese New Year Pinterest Board for more ideas I have collected.

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