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.

Sorry no picture with this ancient dino post. BUT as I did last year, this year is the year to catch up. So posting the dinosaurs it is. Enjoy this Australian dinosaur post. I promise December VERY soon!

What a name – Diamantinasaurus Matildae, known more commonly in Australia as Matilda. This Cretaceous period sauropod is still mostly unknown. Only portions of its skeleton have been recovered to date. It is possibly the biggest sauropod in Australia. In comparison to the other large Titanosaurs, Matilda is actually on the small side. It is considered to be stocky and round with an almost bow legged appearance.

We had one video from LatrobeUniAustralia called Australian Dinosaur – Diamantinasaurus.

The link list is relatively short but definitely interesting…

• Australian Age of Dinosaurs HERE
• Australian Museum HERE
• Dinosaurs.about.com HERE
• Prehistoric Wildlife HERE
• Dinopedia HERE
• Wiki HERE
• There is a rather fanciful picture HERE that I have to share just due to its beauty by Sauropod Vertebrae Picture of the Week
• And our colouring page… from the Disillusioned Taxonomist HERE

…And we are back to the dinosaurs while I sort out pictures for blog posts and proof others. Company, end of summer and back to full day school have slowed me a bit… but I promise to continue catching up! 

#3 on the Dinosaurs.about.com’s list of the top 10 weirdest dinosaurs is the VERY long necked dinosaur Tanystropheus. In fact, scientist believe that its neck is as long as it could be without the dinosaur completely defying physics!!! While not technically a dinosaur this archosaur was found in the Triassic period in Europe and the Middle East. It is actually thought that it would have used its head and neck much like a fishing line.

Our videos! First… Dinosaur Safari (Late Triassic) Clip #11: Tanystropheus by Kyle Hartman.

And the second, Tribute to Tanystropheus by ArchosaurKing.

And now our links:

• Dinosaurs.about.com HERE
• Jurassic Park Wikia HERE
• ReptileEvolution.com HERE
• BBC HERE
• The Big Zoo HERE
• The Pterosaur Heresies HERE
• Prehistoric Wildlife HERE
• Wiki HERE
• And our colouring page… it is off of deviantArt HERE thanks to the artist HyphenatedSuperHero HERE.