Lunar New Year

Remember the photo backdrop teaser from my last post?  One day I dressed the girls up and did some practice shots.

Katie couldn't wait to get out of the "hot" silk and undo her hair.  I was disappointed she couldn't have left her hair alone.  

Hannah closed her eyes and cringed when I put a little colored lip gloss on her.  

But the pictures are okay, so I took the backdrop to school, and took pictures of a couple of my classes.  Most of the school is out right now (distance learning due to covid) so I'll take some more pictures next week, when more of them have come back.  Good thing it's a 2 week long holiday.

I thought I was going to use a recipe from our Eat2Explore box (Chinese New Year celebration - explore CHINA for $20 per box) but we ended up doing Panda Express instead.  

This is a rawr face.  I sometimes have the girls help me with the crafts I'm planning to do with the younger kids.  "Here, make this tiger puppet for me as an example for the first graders."  FYI, it was too complex to have the first graders color the tigers and assemble the puppet in the allotted time we had.  They had to take their bags "to go" and finish them later.  I should have just printed pre-colored tigers for them.  

This is a spiral dragon.  It's a scissor practice thing.  

Miss Katie got a tiger shirt, because she's a tiger.  

Small bulletin board with Tiger and some "red" envelopes, and some Chinese New Year books.  

I ordered the classroom decorating kit from Oriental Trading and it came with a ginormous dragon.  The pink bookcase has Valentine books in it now.  

Backup China books to replenish the CNY display as kids check them out.  In the background, you can see a bag of pompoms.  I'm planning to have the kids practice using chopsticks on those and some yarn bits.  Update:  this was well received by the kids.  

Window decorations

Updated my little board from "snow" to February with heart bordered rules and a few pieces from leftover trim.  Oh, and you can see my gold tiger on red paper, too.  Art Projects For Kids printable and gold markers.  My 3rd/4th combo class couldn't finish this in one sitting, but I told them they could work on it again next week.  

The remainder of the OTC décor.

Another "let's try this at home" project.  

Shaving cream tiger.

Tiger is face down in the cream & food coloring.

I'm glad I tried this at home first.  

When you wipe the cream off, which is part of the directions, it ended up just smearing black everywhere.  I think I know what the problem was.  I used cake gel coloring for the black.  I've never seen black liquid coloring, because black is so hard to dye.  Although my fingers were gray for a day.   

I will not be doing the tigers at school, but perhaps I'll do some giant Easter eggs on cardstock and let the kids color those this way instead.  Maybe outside.  

The pictures of the kids at school came out so cute!  I wish I could share them with you.  I put them in frames over the weekend and will pass them out this week.  

I passed out red envelopes with chocolate coins inside to the 3rd grade and up classes.  I was afraid chocolate might be messy with the younger kids.  I used the ducks (and some folding fans I had left over from prior years) as prizes for Chinese New Year bingo with the middle school kids.  This actually kept them engaged, so I'll be doing bingo again next month.  

And that's our Lunar New Year celebrations for year of the tiger.