Celebrating Chinese New Year

We started celebrating Chinese New Year the year before we traveled to adopt Rosa from China. It is now a family tradition and something the kids really look forward to. Jacob and Rosa especially enjoy eating Chinese food and getting hung bao which are red "lucky money" envelopes. Below I have listed our favorite books about Chinese New Year and some other related books, crafts, activities, and websites. Chinese New Year begins this year on January 26th and 2009 is the year of the Ox.

Reading List for Chinese New Year
Happy New Year!/Kung-Hsi Fa-Ts'ai! by Demi
Celebrating Chinese New Year by Diane Hoyt-Goldsmith
Lion Dancer: Ernie Wan's Chinese New Year by Kate Waters
Celebrating Chinese New Year: An Activity Book by Hingman Chan













Books for Preschoolers
Dragon Dance: A Chinese New Year Lift-the-Flap Book by Joan Holub and Benrei Huang
Lanterns and Firecrackers: A Chinese New Year Story by Jonny Zucker and Jan Barger Cohen














Learn Some Mandarin On-Line for Free
Learn Chinese is a great website where you can learn how to pronounce words in Mandarin through the use of the websites audio files. This is how we learned the Mandarin we know!

Crafts
Activity Village has some great Chinese New Year crafts.
Kaboose has more fun Chinese New Year crafts.

Websites with Activities, Unit Studies, and More
Enchanted Learning
Activity Village
Squidoo has a Chinese New Year unit study
Squidoo also has an Ancient China unit study
Knowledge Quest Maps has a China unit study as well
abcteach has lots of free China related printables

Other Great Kid's Books About China
One Year in Beijing by Xiaohong Wang
Ms. Frizzle's Adventures: Imperial China by Joanna Cole
The Children of China: An Artist's Journey by Song Nan Zhang