Printable Chinese New Year Craft (FREE)

Celebrate the Lunar New Year with your kids by making this fun printable Chinese New Year craft.

Featuring designs for all twelve zodiac animals this free download creates a cool scene with Chinese lanterns, red envelopes, fireworks and your choice of animal so you can go for our Chinese dragon as shown here or opt for the animal for the year you were born in, whichever takes your fancy.

Printable Chinese New Year Craft

We love celebrating the Lunar New Year and this fun craft scene with twelve different designs for each of the lunar animals means that you can have fun joining in the festivities too.

There are three different pages to cut out and color before you build them into a scene that you can display at home or in classrooms.

This printable is free to download and you can print as many copies as you like so it’s also ideal for classroom use or you could make one for each of the zodiac animals to display!

Zodiac Animals

There are twelve different animal in the Chinese zodiac, each with their own personalities.

In the PDF file you’ll find a design of each of the zodiac animals:

• Rat
• Ox
• Tiger
• Rabbit
• Dragon
• Snake
• Horse
• Goat
• Monkey
• Rooster
• Dog
• Pig

Chinese New Year is also known as the Lunar New Year or Spring Festival. In 2025 it will take place on Wednesday 29th January and it will be the year of the snake while in 2026 it will take place on Tuesday 17th February and it will be the year of the horse.

Craft Supplies

• Chinese New Year Craft PDF
• Cardstock or thick white paper
• Scissors
• Glue or double sided tape
• Coloring materials – crayons, coloring pencils or markers

How To Make Your Craft Scene

Start by printing your template out onto plain white paper or cardstock.

You will only need to print the pages you actually need so make sure that you update your printer settings to just choose the middle and background pages as well as the zodiac animal that you want.

While you can use normal printer paper for this craft I would highly recommend that you use cardstock or thick white paper to help it stand up.

Next color in all of the three black and white picture areas and then using your scissors cut around the dotted lines to remove they grey areas as indicated on the printable.

Fold the tabs and then stick them  together following the guidance – A1 to A2 etc.

For this craft I would recommend using double sided tape rather than glue as it will immediately secure the parts of the craft together.

This is however also a bit of a downside to it as once you have stuck the tabs together they can’t be adjusted (unlike with a glue stick or school glue) so make sure that you have your have placed them correctly before you stick them together.

More Free Printable Chinese New Year Activities

I’ve shared loads of free printables for kids crafts to help you have fun at home with your child without having to spend a fortune.

On this site you’ll find craft templates for activities you can try throughout the year but these are ones that are particularly suited to the Lunar New Year.

You can grab our printable paper lantern template which has marks on it to help show your child where to cut.

You could print the template straight onto red paper or why not paint your paper lanterns as we have here to give them a spring blossom design that would be great for the New year celebrations. These would make great DIY decorations too.

Grab this Chinese lantern template and try out some simple crafts using it like this mosaic lantern I made with my daughter.

Our Chinese dragon template is great for some easy dragon crafts and these printable templates make great coloring pages too.

How To Get Your Free Printable Chinese New Year Craft Scene

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