We had so much fun today making this Chinese lantern craft that I had to write it up straight away! With Chinese New Year on the way I thought this would be a good way to teach my son a bit about other cultures and he was really intrigued by it, especially as I told him it was an excuse for us to eat Chinese food! This is a simple craft that’s perfect for preschoolers and my one year old enjoyed playing with the tissue paper too.
What You'll Find on This Page
Materials:
Red Card
Black Card (optional)
Glue
Tissue Paper
How we make our tissue paper Chinese lanterns:
I cut some red card into a lantern shape and some black card into the shape of a handle. You could of course do this as one piece of card but I quite liked the look of having two different colours! My son stuck the handle onto his lantern and then set about tearing up some tissue paper and gluing it onto the lantern. You can do this just as a way of decorating it or talk about how the lanterns are bright because they are lit. It’s a fun way for young children to work with different ways of decorating something rather than just using paints.
Things we learnt about:
My son hadn’t seen Chinese lanterns before so I goggled some images for him to look at which helped him get more interested in this activity. We spoke about how in China different colours can symbolise different things, for example red signifies good fortune, pink signifies romance and orange is for money. My son decided that he wanted to use yellow because (at least according to the site I looked at!) yellow signifies doing well at your job or at school. Or in our case ‘doing really well at playgroup’ which I love that he wanted to excel at, obviously he’s working hard on his train playing skills at the moment!
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Lucas & Grace say – This is fab. We are really interested in the Chinese New Year. We run a weekly linky over at KidGLloves called Mini Creations and this would be a fab addition. We open every Wednesday morning. We’d love for you to link up 🙂 #minicreations
You’ve inspired me to do some lanterns with my kids! I’ve lived in Mainland China and need to get my children to understand and learn more about the culture.
Kriss, that’s exactly the kind of comment I love to hear, thank you 😀
Wow! These are a fab idea. I can’t wait to try this with my daughter. 🙂
#MiniCreations
Lucas says – These look AWESOME. We’ve been learning about Chinese New Year at school and we made Chinese lanterns too. These are AWESOME and I’m now trying to get the Mother to cook some yummy Chinese food too…………………….. Thanks for linking to #minicreations