dragon week part 1

Last week we had a fun week with a Dragon theme since Chinese new year is coming up.  We focused on dragons, and I know there's so much more we could have done, but I kinda pulled it together at the last minute.  In fact, I found some more things so we are going to have some more fun with dragons for a few more days.

First we made this Chinese New Year 3D paper model.  Actually, this was mostly me.  I put it together, but we all enjoy looking at her.

We read the story of PING, and everyone contributed a piece to the art project that followed.  Aric colored the boat, April colored the duck, and I colored the background river.  Such a cute story of a little duck who lives on the Yangtze river.



We spelled the word Dragon and glued those words to red and yellow party streamers.

Our dragon words hanging up.  Somehow the big R went missing, but I found it later.  April was confused at first why it said DAGON, but I had hope we would find the R!

Aaron loved rolling a dice with the characters from the movie "how to train your dragon" and graphed the results.  Aaron also traced the dragon, and wrote the letter Dd.



Aric learned the character names from "how to train your dragon" movie.  He had a good time with this.  These are 3 part learning cards where he sees the name with the picture, and then he has to match the names and pictures that aren't together.



Here he matched "Hiccup" with his dragon "toothless".



April learned how to draw a cartoon dragon, and made this one for me.  Looks like we'll be working on how to spell Chinese :-)



Aaron did a dragon color by number.  Not sure what ANOR means.  I think maybe it's the dragon's name??



Aric did this activity...making a pattern out of the "how to train your dragon" characters.  I gave him the pieces and he did it all by himself.  He didn't want my help.  I was pretty impressed.  Like I said, this kid loves school!


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We also read some other books, but not very many.  I tried getting some from the library, but most of them were all checked out!  Must be a popular dragon time.  I need to add some dragon books to our library.

All these materials were found at the following blogs and websites:

• DLTK's holiday activities:  The Chinese new year doll was from here. They have a whole Chinese new year section we did one of the dragon crafts here too.
• Activity village:  They have a whole section for Chinese new year too.  Lots of fun printables too.  From here:  learn to draw a dragon.
• 1+1+1=1:  This is where the "How to Train Your Dragon" activities came from.  She has a whole preschool pack.

The story of ping art activity was my own idea:-)  I have found a few more things to do this week, so I may post a part 2.  Tomorrow we're going to learn how to say:  Gung Hay Fat Choy, which means "wishing you good fortune and happiness".

Happy Chinese New Year!

I'm linking this up to: