Chinese New Year 2013

We love celebrating all the holidays we can, and Chinese New Year is one of them! We have done this now for many years. This year is the year of the snake, so we had to make a snake! We had crafts done in the morning, and then picked up some take out from our favorite little place. We had egg drop soup, pork egg rolls, pork fried rice, and fried dumplings.

I always have a decent stash of toilet paper tubes around the house because you really never know when they will come in handy! As soon as I saw this neat snake, I knew the kids would love to make it. Found here on Cheap Crafty Mama, we did things a little differently. We all took turns painting the sections, we used brass brads to hold him together, and L used a black bingo stamper to give him his wonky eyes. This turned out so cute, I think he might have to be left out for some time.

Last year we attempted paper lanterns, so this year I wanted to try something a little different. I saw these Good Fortune banners on Dim Sum, Bagels, and Crawfish.  She has a link to a step by step on how to make the characters. We had so much fun working on these, and they look so pretty!

Pinterest Inspired Kid Crafts!

The kids and I love to do crafts, but now with school and all our other things, we seldom get to do any. So with yesterday being a nice, relax at home day, we busted out supplies. We checked out my Pinterest boards and pulled some ideas out. We finished 5 crafts, and got 1 started that will be finished today.




The first craft was this cute mug of hot chocolate craft from Melissa and Doug! They have this nice free printable and directions on how to do it. We did add the real hot chocolate mix to our mugs, and the kids insisted on using real mini marshmallows instead on the ones provided on the print out. I did use a heavy card stock to print this on. It helps to hold up against the mix and marshmallows.

Next up, our 100th day of school is coming up this week, and I find that any fun way to teach counting up that high is very welcome! This one comes from the blog For The Love Of Kindergarten but sadly the link no longer goes to a post. So I will link to the pin instead.  This was super easy! On heavy white card stock, I free hand drew the 100 in the middle, and using a ruler, drew lines making 10 sections. I used 5 different colors of paint (so use each color twice), we dipped q-tips into the paint and made 10 dots in each section. The kids then asked if they could paint in the 100, and we said, "Sure, why not!" They both though this was a fun way to count by 10's all the way to 100!

This very cute penguin craft was picked out by L. Super easy, and very fun! This one comes to us from Reading Confetti.  I used some bowls from the kitchen to use as tracers for all of the pieces. I used a white colored pencil to trace on the black paper, and let the kids all cut out all their own pieces. We then set them the way we wanted them to look, and got to gluing. We had extra paint left from the 100 craft, so we used that for the eyes. For other penguin craft ideas, check out what we did last year.

Last year for the 100th day of school, L wanted a special shirt to wear. I found this cute monster one from Simply Modern Mom! So of course we needed to copy it. ;-) Well, now that D is coming up on her first 100 days of school, she needed a special shirt to wear as well. We came up with a gumball machine that had 100 pompom gumballs glued on. Adam used Sharpie markers to draw the image on the t-shirt, and I used fabric glue to attach the pompoms or googly eyes to the shirts.