Chinese New Year Dragon Craft

Happy Chinese New Year! 2012 is The Year of the Dragon so it was fun to choose an activity for today. A quick search online for project ideas came up with several options. We made a dragon puppet from enchantedlearning.com. Here's what you'll need:

Construction paper
Staples, glue and/or tape
Crayons or markers
Two craft sticks

First I drew a dragon head and tail on a single sheet of construction paper for Molly (4) to color. Meanwhile, I took a second sheet of construction paper and folded it in half, then cut it so I had a long skinny rectangle of paper. I folded it fan-style. The website's instructions say to connect two rectangles together to make one very long body, but we kept ours shorter and it still works great!

When Molly was done decorating her dragon, I helped her cut it out and stapled the head and tail to the body. Then we taped two craft sticks to the back of the head and tail to make our puppet! Molly immediately put on a puppet show behind her chair and then we walked in a parade with our dragons around our house! Also, while Ben (1) was sleeping, I made one for him so he could have it to play with when he woke up!


Also to celebrate Chinese New Year, I printed out a Year of the Dragon envelope I found online. It only took a minute to cut it out and glue it together. I put a few chocolate coins inside and my kids will get them for dessert tonight after dinner! We're also watching Mulan and I printed out some coloring pages with the dragon on it with our totally awesome HP printer. I think you can find those pages at disney.com!


(Sorry for the sideways picture - it was straight and then uploaded that way!)

Here's a link to the Dragon envelope:
http://www.activityvillage.co.uk/pdfs/year_of_the_dragon_envelope_1.pdf