Chinese New Year is a holiday we have tried our best to celebrate for at least 5 or 6 years now. This is all thanks to the families of our two gorgeous god daughters (Anna and Isabella). Their moms are from the same city in China (Ghangzou) and have been kind enough to help us learn how to fully embrace this holiday. I love the changing date of the celebration based on the lunar calendar and it has come to mean more than the “traditional” North American New Years to me. We do a significant amount of preparation for this holiday, cleaning, researching and shopping for food, reading out favourite themed stories (The Runaway Wok by Ying Chang Compestine). This year it was Trinity’s turn to do a full on lapbook for the season. She worked really hard on it and it shows.

We finished up our day with take out from our favourite Chinese food restaurant – The Rose Garden.

I have worksheets to share:

• Activity Village HERE
• Education.com collection HERE and chicken collection HERE
• Definitely make sure you search EnchantedLearning.com for their resources HERE

Books to suggest:

• Happy Chinese New Year, Kai-Lan! HERE
• The Nian Monster by Andrea Wang (a new book for us!) by Andrea Wang HERE
• Celebrate Chinese New Year by Carolyn Otto HERE
• Chinese New Year Crafts by Karen E. Bledsoe HERE
• Chinese New Year by Grace Jones HERE
• Celebrating Chinese New Year by Diana Hoyt-Goldsmith HERE
• Chinese New Year by Ann Heinrichs HERE
• Long-Long’s New Year by Catherine Gower HERE
• The Runaway Rice Cake by Ying Chang Compestine HERE
• Fortune Cookie Fortunes by Grace Lin HERE
• Red Butterfly by Deborah Noyes HERE
• Red Kite, Blue Kite by Ji-li Jiang HERE
• Kai-Lan’s Great Trip to China HERE

And a few DVD’s for you to hunt down:

• Celebrate With Kai-Lan! HERE
• Stone Soup (a read-along) HERE

Of course there is the lapbook Trinity used! Currclick has it for 3.00 HERE. This is put out by A Journey Through Learning Lapbooks.

And don’t forget our yearly video!

For our Chicken/Rooster research we had a couple books as well:

• Chickens by Katie Dicker HERE
• Young Chicken Farmers by Vickie Black HERE

I used this amazing designer to make this year’s Zodiac animal – the rooster. I used her last year to make a monkey as well (see my County Fair post from last here HERE). Her site is called All about Ami and you can find her rooster pattern HERE and the monkey HERE.

We also splurged this year and bought two dresses for the girls off of Amazon. They were not overly expensive and definitely not high quality, but so cute!

Of course we also picked up new shirts for the boys at Walmart. And buzzed the twins’ heads. New clothes and fresh haircuts in a clean house. And I mean CLEAN! We threw out, sorted, donated… you name it we got rid of excess. And it felt amazing. So Happy Chinese New Year All! Let’s hope the year of the Rooster is auspicious and prosperous!

The girls love to sort through their toys and find theme friendly pieces.