Cuisine & Culture the Chinese Family Way
Do you like origami and love to learn about Chinese culture? Then this is the right place for you – check out this awesome looking ang pow origami dog! The first day of the Chinese New Year 2018 falls on the 16th February which is the Year of the Earth Dog. The Dog is the eleventh of all zodiac animals. It is one of the most important days for Chinese culture. It marks the new year and we welcome the good fortune into the home by hanging lots of decorations!
Happy Chinese New Year! 新年快乐 Saying bye bye to the Brother Horse and welcoming the Year of the gentle Goat/Sheep. This year, we have been making a lot of sheep crafts. Do take a look at our CNY Pinterest board! To help keep us busy this half term, we decided to make a goat from a wooden spoon. This year happens to be the Wood Goat year. So what better than making a craft out of wood!
Last Tuesday, we had our Lichfield Mandarin Club’s Chinese New Year celebration and one of the party snacks was fortune cookies. They are my son’s favourite and he even kept all the strips of papers as he really hopes that they will come true!
In these coming months, I will be partnering with a few major retailers for the National Stationery Week (27 April – 3 May 2015) to get Britain writing, and to focus on the importance of handwriting.
This week I have received this staple free stapler from KOKUYO, Japan’s leading stationery brand. Harinacs staple free stapler holds sheets of paper without using metal staples (maximum of 6 sheet of paper at a weight of 80 gsm). This innovative and quirky stapler comes in three different designs and in a range of fun colours; including pink, blue, green, brown, white and black. They are available to buy from www.stonegift.com. So I am using Harinacs staple to make a stapleless Chinese New Year lantern.
I am so thrilled to join in Multicultural Kids Blogs’ first annual series on Chinese New Year. Today I am sharing this Chinese New Year spiral craft. This spiral craft is great for decoration for teaching your children to recognise the Chinese New Year auspicious words. This is very simple to make.
A big welcome to our week 4 of the Tuesday Tutorials Pintorials Pin Party! It is almost the end of the month! How are your new year resolutions holding up? I wanted to exercise more and it’s so far so good – I’ve been covering 3,000 steps a day.
This is my Chinese New Year ang pow flower lantern tutorial. If you would like to learn about other lantern designs I had made previously, do take a look at my Pinterest board for Chinese New Year.
I had mentioned in my previous blog post that I would be sharing Chinese New Year’s craft ideas and different types of sheep crafts with you. Today, I am sharing eight different types of activities that you can do with your children.
I always wanted my children to learn and understand our Chinese culture. But living in the UK, it is quite hard to expose my children to our Chinese culture. So I decided to bring it closer to them by showing them the different types of crafts I made when I was young and let them taste different types of New Year’s food like Nian Gao and other types of goodies. One day I will bring them to Singapore Chinatown for Chinese New Year.
As this coming Chinese lunar year is the Year of the Sheep, I will be sharing different types of sheep crafts with you! This is my second craft for sheep and we have used paper plates to make a sheep.
It is the time of the year to start making some Chinese New Year crafts! This year, the first day of Chinese New Year falls on the 19 February 2015 and it will last for 15 days. Last year, I had made quite a few Ang Pow lanterns, taught the children simple ways to learn the Chinese zodiac, did various paper cuttings and also made a 3D Chinese “Spring” character. Click on the title Chinese Culture to look at my previous Chinese New Year crafts.
This coming year is the year of the Sheep. During these next few weeks, I will be sharing different types of sheep crafts with you!
Today, I am showing you how to make a Chinese character sheep 羊 using ang pow (red packet). This is a very simple way to decorate your wall and teach your children Chinese words.
This is another post for my Chinese New Year series and today it is about craft. Last week, we made 3D Paper Cutting Chinese New Year Spring 春 and today we cut the 旺 (wang in hanyu pinyin) Chinese character. In Singapore during Chinese New Year, you will often hear people say/shout Huat Ah (in Hokkien language) in the street, dinner party or when they want to win the lottery! It means to prosper and be wealthy. So people adapt 旺 into Chinese New Year culture. 旺 is the translation of Huat.
I am bilingual and I would like both my children to learn Chinese, which is their mother tongue, as it will be very useful wherever they go. I am not great at teaching my children Chinese and have to find fun ways to get them to learn. We did this craft with our Lichfield Mandarin Club last year and this has proved to be a very useful way to teach children.
Lunar New Year is also know as Chinese Spring Festival. It is a quite a long story as to why it is called Spring Festival but the short version is that it is mainly based on mainland Chinese ruling. Spring 春 is widely used on the Chinese New Year theme or Auspicious words on Festival Couplets (New Year’s wishes on pieces of red papers) like:
迎春接福 Yíng chún jiē fú – Greet the New Year and encounter happiness
春回大地 chūn huí dà dì – Spring has come back to the earth
We have been busy making Chinese New Year Ang Bao/Pow Star. This is how we made it!
Fans are easy to make – it is mainly sticking and pasting or painting. While the kids had a go at making their fans, I also made two proper Chinese New Year Fans.
