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Paper Chinese Dragon Boat Race

10 June 2016 by Eileen

Yesterday we were celebrating the Dragon Boat Festival, which is also known as the Duanwu Festival, and falls on the 9th June 2016. It occurs on the 5th day of the 5th month of the traditional lunar calendar. The festival involves eating dumplings (zongzi – sticky rice) and racing dragon boats!  If you want to know how the dumplings look like, check out my post I wrote two years ago.

As some of you might remember that I help run Lichfield Mandarin Club which started four years ago and I like to involve arts and crafts with the children especially Chinese festival. So this school half term, I organized a Dragon Boat festival.

Make your own Paper Chinese Dragon Boat Race

I decided to teach the children to make origami paper boats and do a boat race.  Initially, we decided to use baby bath tubs as that is the only thing we had at home. Fortunately, one of the parents had two plastic gutter tubes which were sealed at both ends for us to use for the race.

To do this boat race, you will need:

  • Paper boat – use thick square paper and coat with wax (bought from The Works)
  • Straw – we used bubble milk tea straws which you can get from a Chinese supermarket
  • Gutters – DIY shops

Before the lesson, I made a paper boat chart to provide a guide for the children to follow.  If you don’t know how to do it, simply google or YouTube it, there are so many tutorials of making it!

paper boat origami tutorials

As we are going to use the paper boat for racing, we did think that the paper would soak through.  To prevent this, we used candle wax to coat/rub on the paper and some of them used tape to tape the bottom of the boat.  We did have bubble wrap and foam but this proved too difficult to stick on the paper boat.

Next, fill up the gutters with water and now you are ready to race!  Ready, steady, blow!

dragon boat race using paper boat

We have split the children into two groups and arranged them according to their age to race among themselves. All the children had so much fun and wanted to play it again and again! Shame that some of the boats dipped in a lot of water and the paper just gave way!

paper boat race dragon boat race
Dragon Boat Festival

This was a very fun activity for the children to learn about the festival and to do their own boat race!  Watch this video to see how they played it!  Take caution that the screaming and shouting were very loud!

Disclosure: We have included Amazon affiliate links to the products. If you click on this and buy, we may earn a small commission.

Related

Filed Under: Chinese Festivals

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Comments

  1. Amanda Miss Panda says

    18 May 2017 at 10:19 pm

    This is such a fun activity for Dragon Boat Festival! We really enjoyed it.

    • Eileen Teo says

      19 May 2017 at 11:09 am

      Thanks for letting me know!

Trackbacks

  1. Dumpling Craft for Dragon Boat Festival - ET Speaks From Home says:
    17 December 2021 at 9:28 pm

    […] you are still looking for more craft ideas, why not check out our paper dragon boat race […]

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Hello!

Welcome to ET Speaks From Home!

I'm Eileen, a proud mum of two teenagers (aged 17 and 16), my daughter is living with visual impairment. Since launching this blog in May 2012, we’ve continued to grow and evolve, sharing our family’s journey and passions.

I love cooking, crafting, DIY projects, writing about Chinese culture, and creating YouTube reviews.

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