Chinese New Year

February 10, 2013, began the Chinese year of the snake. Leading up to this festival season, I thought would be a good time for a "China" theme. We did some Chinese New Year themed colouring pages and quite a few themed crafts. E learnt how to find China on her globe and how to say "Ni Hao". We made a few paper decorations, like the "fu" banner to the left.

We learnt a bit about some Chinese inventions, including the abacus. E had lots of practice counting on her's. I also made a cardboard tangram puzzle for her to try and she has been having fun with it ever since. She also did a simple Chinese flag puzzle, but that wasn't nearly as fun. We made (and ate) some Chinese style foods including spring rolls, noodles, and a sweet & sour stir-fry.

Thanks to an idea from lightly enchanted, we made some goldfish kites (see right) to hang up around the house. E loved this craft and wanted to make more and more!

Lastly, we made some dragon puppets to dance around with. For these I simply printed the dragon head and tail pieces to colour in. Then we cut them out and glued them together with a long piece of folded paper in the middle and taped on a couple of pop-sticks to hold.

-Polly

Puppet Show

E had a little, plastic Spongebob Squarepants toy that was always getting lost and has a broken foot, but she liked it because it was her only Spongebob toy. One day when she was looking for her toy, I decided to make her this set:

I printed pictures of some characters from the show, stuck them on cardboard and added some pop-sticks to make puppets. I added black outlines to the Patrick and Sandy puppets after the pictures were taken to make them more cohesive.
Here's E putting on her Spongebob Squarepants puppet show:

It was even better than the television show.
-Polly