Celebrating Chinese New Year With A BANG!

My eldest son's interest in China, specifically the Great Wall led us to this celebration.  Part of our weekly schedule is going to our local library and borrowing topic books that the boys are interested in.  As easy as it is nowadays to 'google' everything (which we do as well), I still make it to a point that we still utilize information from actual books and make internet searches supplementary.  Anthony asked me, 'What is the largest structure ever built?' (he is really into building stuff now...LEGO's, Minecraft, KNEX, among others) so  I told him about the Great Wall of China.  By coincidence, one of the mom from our home school group posted an event about a Chinese Festival celebration.  That's how we ended up doing a week lesson about Chinese New Year and you can tell, the rest is history.

How do we approach a topic of interest?  We always start with a book or books.  Usually we just ask our librarian for recommendations or sometimes other moms from our home school group for suggestions (both are great resources). We picked this one since the information are presented in a very child-friendly way, lots of pictures, concise but very informative.  It has even additional section for art activities, recipes, and vocabulary words that we all utilized.

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Circle snakes using different colored construction papers.  In addition to Aidan developing his fine motor skills (cutting papers), we also used this art activity to review colors and shapes, make patterns with the snake's body and promotes creativity.

We've learned about the customs and traditions on how Chinese celebrated New Year and the reasons why they do it that way.  Since the Philippines (where I'm from) celebration , of New Year is very similar to the Chinese (ours is celebrated however during January 1st), I was able to share my own childhood experiences to my boys and relate them to our readings.  Below is a list of some similarities between the Philippines and Chinese ways of celebrating New Year.

• Cleaning the house the day before New Year but not on the day- to remove 'bad' luck from the previous year and to give way to the 'good' luck of the coming year.
• Wearing red (putting red signs on windows and doors)- Red is a color for good luck.
• Having bright and loud noises (fireworks, fire crackers)- to chase away bad spirits.
• Serving sweet and sticky dishes- to please the gods
• Having round fruits on the table- round shape of coins, tangerines-color of prosperity; in the Philippines we make a basket with thirteen round fruits to represent the twelve months of the year and the extra fruit for prosperity.

Anthony enjoying the rice cake (recipe taken form the book shown above) with dried fruits that he helped make.  Cooking and baking is a great opportunity to teach/review math concepts like counting and fractions..

Some of the foods we tried at the Chinese Festival
(dumpling, fried mushroom and bean ball with
sesame seeds)

The fruit basket I made this year for the New Year 2014
with thirteen round fruits.

Aidan in front of the food my mom made for New Year celebration (rice cake- puto and cutchinta, rice balls in coconut sauce-bilo bilo).

As an extension, for Literature, we discussed what is a 'legend' since in the book, it told a legend of the bad dragon and how the villagers chased it away from their place (which is a key feature in the celebration of Chinese New Year- dancing dragon on the streets).  I also used this to teach the boys about the phases of the moon, the rotation of the earth and the revolution of the moon around  the earth; since Chinese New Year follows a Lunar calendar.
To pursuit Anthony's initial question about the largest structure on Earth, we also looked at the history of the Great Wall and the engineering behind it.  As an icing on the cake, we went to a Chinese Festival where we were able to enjoy some Chinese customs through traditional dances, food and crafts.

Drum dance

Aidan with the dragon in the back ground.

The boys posing in front of the 'golden' lion.

FYI: For 2014, the Chinese New Year Celebration is on January 31.  Unlike Western New Year celebration, the date of the Chinese New Year changes every year depending on the appearance of the first new moon of the new year.
We hope this can help you celebrate Chinese New Year with a BANG!
 It's just around the corner ... Gong Hei Fat Choy!