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.

Just a little late sharing but… we always make a bit of a fuss. I know that we should show love and affection year round, which we do. But it is nice to reinforce the need to SHOW this emotion with a month of careful labeling of Valentines, discussion of how to show we care and a slough of themed worksheets! Which I will share some links to, of course. 

We have a few traditions we do each year. Pictures in red and white clothes, of course.

A red and white lunch… this gets tricky as I don’t like to make the same thing every year. This year I splurged on Swedish pancakes, strawberry jam and chocolate from IKEA, heart shaped cakes, strawberries and whipped cream, those awful candies with words on them and pink lemonade. 

We spend half the day crafting. This coincided with our once a year (at least) request to decorate t shirts. I don’t force a theme on those but let them go wild. This year I picked a new set of rainbow thinner point markers and Gavin proved that they were a rather smart buy. 

With older kids now (oh my the twins are 13!!!) we are able to leave them to their own devices from time to time. So Ken and I made them walking tacos and rented the movie Storks for them, snuck out and went to Khan’s Mongoli Grill for the first time in FOREVER. We ate way too much and had a lovely time. 

When we got home it was time for cake! Yup, full on spoiling of the kids this year. 

Ken and I didn’t really exchange gifts. He says I cheated because I made him this heart.

I had to laugh as earlier in the week he offered me some shopping on Amazon. It just happened to show up on Valentine’s Day. So BAM my present. 

The kids got some Valentines in the mail, and exchanged with each other. We put the fairies and Hello Kitty Aunty Holly sent us out for decoration and had to have a fashion show of the new tops from Gammie.

All in all a fun day! I just hope our mailed Valentines make it to everyone. Poor Ken had a few trips to the post office this month!!! Now for the worksheets!

Activity Village has a whole section for Valentines – they have gone to a pay format but it is so worth it HERE

My collection that includes past years choices on Education.com HERE

EnchantedLearning (also pay for) HERE

Well it is that time again – our traditional visit with Macy’s Santa with Nana and Baba. We actually went early this year what with Nana and Baba’s visit being over Thanksgiving. (Zander is in blue stripes)

I cheated and ordered our two new dresses off Amazon, and at the last minute! They got in the morning of our trip to the cities. 

The boys lucked out with a combination of new Walmart sale find shirts and an old favourite for the boy who misplaced his new shirt. 

Some photos, Dad and Baba done their work and off we went.

The display at Macy’s is basically the same thing every year with small additions. We figure this year there are a few new animals out. 

We took quite a few photos. Though every year we find it takes less and less time to go through the display. 

The real draw is SANTA, of course. 

Official Santa pic.

After Santa was letters and snacks and more photos. 

We have one final tradition – after all the seasonal fun it is off to Culver’s for dinner. 

We were so glad Nana and Baba could be here for something that this year marked the beginning of our Christmas season.