Happy Lunar New Year!! (Take 1)

This is the 5th Lunar New Year that we have celebrated with Elli & Tori and our second with Ryan. Each year, except perhaps for E & T's first year home, I had great intentions of putting on a Chinese New Year Celebration for their daycare or preschool. Well, I never quite managed it. It always fell through the cracks and ended up being something quite lame (red frosted cupcakes one year), or nothing at all. But, I am happy to say, this year we pulled it off!! For various reasons, I did not want to do this at their school, so we did this in a fairly risk free environment of their Daisy Girl Scout troop, which is not associated with our school.

I have to say E & T were sooo excited about the event. Elli wore her New Year's dress. Tori decided on her T-shirt from the Beijing Olympics. They wanted to greet everyone with a Ni Hao! when their friends arrived, and they were determined to be "leaders" for all the activities. They did not want to participate ("Because we know all this already") :-). They sat next to me while I talked briefly to the troop about China, the holiday and the night's activities and were literally bouncing with excitement. One of the leaders commented on how nice it was to see my normally "shy" little girls act as leaders for the event! So cool. I would say that I wished I had done this sooner, but honestly, for them (and me), I think the timing was right. Their age, and this situation made for a very special, and valuable experience for my ladies. (Sigh of a happy mom.)

So here was our list of activities, and sadly, too few pictures. I forgot my camera at the meeting, but to be honest, I wouldn't have had time to take a picture anyway. This one will just have to live in my brain, not my scrapbook.

These were my plans for the evening:

Introductory talk:
Inflatable globe to point out China
A few facts about China and about the Lunar New Year
Explain what we would be doing this evening and their significance for the holiday.

Activity stations: We broke the girls into three groups

Cooking - making Hoho's noodle soup. Had veggies & such pre-cut & pre-cooked. Each group made one batch of soup & were able to take turns adding ingredients to the pot. The soup tasted okay, not great. I used the noodles they suggested in the recipe, but they turned out differently than the ones in the picture on the site. Ours turned very clear & broke into a lot of small pieces. Not sure what we did wrong here. Despite that I would probably do it again since it was easy to make and had enough ingredients for a group of girls to all participate in making it.

Calligraphy/Craft - Many, many thanks to a favorite author, Grace Lin for this idea. We made New Year's banners with the character "fu" (good luck). She posted this on facebook, which is were I found it. I am including the link here, but not sure that it will take you to the right place. If you go searching for it, it is on facebook, under her Notes dated February 7, 2010. We did the banner, not the firecracker.

Dragon dance craft: We used this template, printed onto to cardstock. Girls colored, cut out and added glitter. Used crepe paper streamers and a paper lunch bag to make a puppet. *This craft was too involved for the time we had. I should have done more of it ahead of time...

Come together as a large group.
Chopsticks game (relay race)
Dragon parade with the dragons that they made.
Followed by bubble wrap firecrackers!!
*Unfortunately, I planned too much and we didn't get to any of these group activities :-(... Oh well, something for next year.

And last, but certainly not least, the FEAST! On our menu:
- Noodle soup made by the girls
- Dumplings (not homemade, but yummy - Ling Ling brand, from Costco)
- Egg Rolls
- Orange slices
- Fortune cookies

And, of course, as each girl left, we gave her a red envelope with a couple of chocolate coins inside.

I did not provide everything we needed for the event, every girl from the troop brought at least one or two things to help out. And everyone in the troop was so open and interested in learning about China and this holiday. It was a great time!