Mosaic Chinese Lantern Craft

Need a quick and easy activity for Chinese New Year? This mosaic Chinese lantern craft is simple to create and uses our free Chinese lantern template to make it even quicker for you to set up.

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I made this mosaic Chinese lantern craft last week with my daughter (who is seven). I really wanted to do a quick craft that I could share with you showing our Chinese lantern template and as soon as she saw what I was doing she wanted to join in and make her own.

It’s always good when a craft is properly kid approved!

This craft is suitable for younger kids too (such as preschoolers) but my daughter really enjoyed making hers.

As you can see from the longer image below our two Chinese lantern crafts look a bit different, my lantern uses the mosaic pieces in a way that is more spaced out while she’s overlapped hers more to ‘colour in’ the spaces.

Both ways are of course equally good, it just depends on what you fancy doing. I didn’t give my daughter any instructions (I was too busy trying to get a quick photo done in our homeschooling break!) but you could suggest one particular style over the other if you wanted to.

Mosaic Crafts

Mosaic crafts are really good to do with kids as as well as being fun they can also involve some useful skills.

Cutting up the pieces of paper is a really good way to practice scissor skills (you will obviously need to do this for younger kids).

Picking up the small pieces of paper is good for their pincer grasp.

You can also use this as a way to discuss shapes, are you cutting out squares or rectangles?

Mosaic Chinese Lantern Materials

For this craft you will need:

• Chinese lantern template (see below) or you can draw a lantern yourself
• Glue
• Scissors
• red paper* and yellow paper*

Scrap paper from old projects is obviously great for crafts like this but if you don’t have any then you can buy red paper* or yellow paper* online. I often buy a pack of coloured paper* so I have different colours to hand when I need them.

You could also make mosaic pieces from cut up old magazines or junk mail but we didn’t have any of this at home.

Chinese Lantern Template

Our PDF template is free to get and we’ve got lots more ideas of Chinese lantern crafts that you can make with it. Click here to find out more details and grab your printable.

Mosaic Chinese Lantern Craft

This easy Chinese lantern craft for kids uses paper and our free template to make a simple mosaic.

5 from 3 votes

Print Pin Rate

Keyword: Chinese New Year

Prep Time: 5 minutes minutes

Activity Time: 10 minutes minutes

Total Time: 15 minutes minutes

Author: Kate Williams

Equipment

• Glue
• Scissors

Materials

• Chinese Lantern Template
• Paper red and yellow

Instructions

• Print off the Chinese lantern template
  
• Cut out small pieces of red and yellow paper.
  
• Cover the main part of your lantern with glue.
  
• Cover each section of the lantern in your paper mosaic pieces.
  
• When the main part of the lantern is covered your craft is done.
  

Notes

I've used red and yellow paper for this craft, you could of course use crap paper from magazines or just use red paper.

Tried this?Mention @craftsonsea - we'd love to see and maybe share it!

More Chinese New Year Crafts for Kids

Want ideas that even young kids can join in with? Check out these Chinese New Year Crafts for Toddlers.