Simple lanterns for Chinese New Year

These simple lanterns make great decorations for Chinese New Year!

To make your lanterns you need:

Some coloured or glittery card - I used an A5 sheet for my lanterns but you can use a larger piece to make a bigger lantern
Pipecleaners for the handle
Washi tape
Sequins
Bostik White Glu
Bostik Foam Pads

Instructions:

Take the piece of card and fold in half. Use scissors to make a series of cuts about 1cm apart, starting at the folded edge and finishing about 1-2cm before the open edge. Unfold the cardboard, bend into a circle and staple in place at the top and the bottom.

Tape the ends of a pipecleaner on the inside of the lantern to form a handle. You may want to secure it firmly in place with a couple of extra staples. Then wrap some washi tape around the top and bottom of the lantern to cover the staples.

Decorate the lantern using coloured sequins. I used a mixture of White Glu and Foam Pads. The White Glu holds the decorations firmly in place and the Foam Pads make the embellishments stand out from the lantern for a bit of extra interest.

When the glue is dry you can display your lanterns! They look great hanging and it would be lovely to make a range of lanterns in different sizes for decorations - perhaps stringing them up as bunting!

You can find more Chinese New Year crafts for toddlers here:

The box of craft materials was provided to me free of charge by Bostik as part of the Tots100/Bostik Craft Bloggers Club.

Chinese New Year crafts with Springboard Supplies

Just before Christmas I shared a selection of Christmas crafting projects from Springboard Supplies, and with Chinese New Year approaching on the 8th of February 2016 we've been having fun with some of their Chinese New Year themed crafting kits. Springboard Supplies are specialists in the supply of creative, educational resources to schools and other groups, and with their craft kits being sold in packs of 30 they are perfect for groups of children to work on together.

The kits contain everything that you need for a craft, and there is plenty of scope for customisation so that you don't end up with a collection of identical pieces. They are also simple to put together so that an adult can easily supervise a large group of children while they craft.

We started with some Concertina Dragons. This is a nice, quiet craft, with quite a complex dragon head and tail that need to be coloured in, and both children spent a lot of time on this.

Then a long strip of paper is folded into a concertina, and when the head and tail are glued on and some sturdy lollipop sticks added for handles you have a brilliant dragon puppet that you can move around and play with. These would be great to perform a puppet show with a group of children and they could really customise their dragons to reflect their own creativity. Mia added streamers on to hers, and you could also decorate the concertina with glitter and sequins.

Next we made some cheerful Chinese New Year Lanterns. The kit itself is very simple, some pre-cut lanterns and shapes to stick on, and we were also sent some gorgeous gold patterned ribbons which we used for the handles. If you are making the lanterns from scratch they can be very fiddly to make, so it's brilliant to have them cut out already, especially if you were making them with a large group of children. You can fold the shape in different ways to create variations on the basic shape, and we made one each. They look lovely hung up around the house!

The Dragon Spirals use the same dragon head and tail as the concertina dragons above, which are glued on to either end of a spiral and hung up with some string or ribbon. Mia loved making her spiral dragon and she waved it around the house before we hung it up. I remember when I was at school the teacher would often hang things that we'd made from the ceilings, and a ceiling full of these dragon spiral decorations would look amazing!

Finally Mia and I made some Tactile Dragons. The kit comes with lots of pretty patterned and coloured strips of fabric that are threaded and knotted through holes in the cardboard dragon shapes. It makes a really fun dragon decoration, perfect for running around the house with.

We had a lot of fun with these kits, and I think that they are brilliant for both larger and smaller groups of children crafting together.

These products are all available from Springboard Supplies, and I received a selection of craft packs in exchange for this review.

Chinese New Year paper cup lanterns

As a Bostik Craft Blogger I recently received some Bostik products along with some crafty goodies and the challenge to come up with a craft for Chinese New Year. I've already shared my paper plate dragon mask and as promised here is a second craft using some of the other things that I received - home made paper cup lanterns.

Here's how we made them:

Materials:

Bostik glu dots
Paper cup - a gold one would be perfect
Pipecleaner
Beads (about four per lantern)
Foam strips
Gold ric rac
Star stickers
Assortment of coloured sequins
White glue and tape
(Tissue paper strips)

Instructions:

First decorate the paper cups using stickers and sequins. The foam star stickers are self adhesive, and we used white glue to stick down the sequins.

Then add the extra trimmings by wrapping the ric rac and foam strips around the cup and securing in place with a glu dot. The glu dots are really sticky and because the pieces were stuck instantly I didn't need to worry about them sliding down the cup while I waited for glue to dry.

Then thread a few beads onto a pipecleaner and make two holes with scissors in the base of the cup to post the pipecleaner through to form the handle. Fold over and secure inside the cup firmly with tape.

If you wanted to make your lantern even prettier you could decorate with some strips of tissue paper stuck around the inside of the paper cup to hang down. We used more glu dots to hold them firmly in place.

You can find more Chinese New Year crafts for toddlers here:

The box of craft materials was provided to me free of charge by Bostik as part of the Tots100/Bostik Craft Bloggers Club.

Chinese New Year paper plate dragon mask

This dragon mask is a really fun craft to make with children for Chinese New Year. The mask can be made using a coloured paper plate or circle of cardboard, and decorated with brightly coloured scraps of paper and card to make a personalised dragon for a child to hold and play with.

I made the mask with Mia, and we had a really fun time!

Materials:

Bostik foam pads (small)
Red paper plate (or you can use a plain white one, or paint it)
Strips of yellow tissue paper
Strips of orange tissue paper
Card - black, red, gold and white
Two yellow pom poms
Lollipop sticks
Glue and tape
Glitter

Instructions:

I found it easier to prepare all the pieces for the mask in advance. I used gold card to cut two flames, the red card to cut a pointy tongue, the black card to make two horns, eye brows and the pupils for the eyes and the white card to make eyes and teeth. You could use coloured paper instead of card, or you could just draw the elements on white paper and colour them in. There are so many different ways that you can make a dragon mask - I used Google images for some inspiration.

I opted to make a mask that can be held in front of the face, but of course you could cut out eye holes so that it can be worn as a mask, with some elastic across the back to hold it across the face.

Then I sat down with Mia and we put the mask together. To stick the pieces on we used Bostik foam pads. These are small enough that they remain hidden, but because they are quite thick they make the stuck on parts of the mask really pop out. I found it easiest to place the sticky pads where she wanted the pieces to go, then she could stick them on. It worked particularly well for the flames at the bottom of the paper plate - I stuck on a row of little sticky pads and Mia stuck down the strips of tissue paper, it was a good opportunity for her to practice patterning as she alternated the colours.

Using the sticky pads was great as it meant that we didn't need to wait for any glue to dry. However the glue did come in generous amounts so that she could add plenty of glitter!

We finished the mask with a lollipop stick taped on either side. This means that the mask can both be held in front of the face, and also 'flown' around the room to scare people!

You can find more Chinese New Year crafts for toddlers here:

The box of craft materials was provided to me free of charge by Bostik as part of the Tots100/Bostik Craft Bloggers Club.

Chinese New Year craft - Dragon toilet roll tube puppets

Crafting for Chinese New Year is a lot of fun, because you can use bright colours, glitter and streamers, and there is lots of inspiration out there. I find that my Chinese New Year crafting tends to be influenced by dragons, and so we made some simple dragon puppets from empty toilet roll tubes.

This has been the first year that I've managed to do some Chinese New Year crafting, as it's a festival that always creeps up on me after Christmas. But this year I took up a challenge set by Red Ted Art to share a Chinese New Year craft. I do like my toilet roll tubes, and so I decided to make some simple Chinese dragon puppets made from toilet roll tubes.

To make these Chinese New Year Dragon Puppets you will need:

A toilet roll tube
Two large pom poms
Two googly eyes
Green paint
White card (for the teeth)
Tissue paper (for the tail, I used red but you could use any colour)
A lollipop stick
Scraps of collage material in dragon colours

Instructions:

First paint the toilet roll tubes in a dragon colour, we used green. Glue a googly eye to each pom pom. When both parts are dry, cut a triangle from each side of one end of the toilet roll tube to create a mouth. Glue the pom poms onto the head of the dragon. You will need plenty of glue to make them stick firmly. Leave it to dry.

Then use collage materials to decorate the dragon. We used scraps of green paper and some small circles cut from gold card for gold scales. Cut some teeth from thin white card and glue inside the mouth.

Cut some long strips of tissue paper for the tail, and staple them firmly inside the back of the dragon at the top. Finally fix a lollipop stick at the bottom of the dragon's back. I used double sided sellotape with more sellotape to cover on top, as it needs to be stuck firmly so that the dragon can be played with. Then the children can fly their dragon about using the lollipop stick to hold on to.

Some Chinese New Year Resources

Because this is our first Chinese New Year craft, we weren't familiar with the story behind Chinese New Year. I found a fantastic printable introduction over on the Twinkl website - The Chinese New Year Story (Twinkl subscriber resource). I printed it out to make a little book, in black and white so that it could be coloured in. The last page of the story book also makes a nice Chinese Zodiac colouring poster, which is marked with recent calendar years so you can use it work out the animal for the year that the children were born in.

I printed out a Chinese New Year word map (free download) to help Harry extend his reading vocabulary. Many of the words, such as the names of the animals, are ones that he uses regularly anyway. I also printed him a colour by numbers dragon (free download), as he loves colouring, and the sense of achievement that comes from working out which colours to use.

You can find more Chinese New Year crafts for toddlers here: