龙年吉祥！(Lóng nián jíxiáng!) Good Luck in the Year of the Dragon!

I am so excited for tomorrow! We're going to be celebrating Chinese New Year!

As I posted before, the children at our school are fortunate to have Mr. Wu in their lives. He's our Chinese teacher this year and my kiddos had their first lesson last week. Mr. Wu asked the kiddos what they knew about China and all they could come up with was that they eat Chinese food. I was like, oh...gosh. Time to bring in some culture before our next lesson. My mom reminded me that we had a bunch of Chinese New Year decorations thanks to my sister's themed engagement party several years ago (Yep...we're a "theme" family...once a theme is chosen, we go all out.) so while I worked on my lesson plans for this week, mom handled the decorating. Needless to say, my room was transformed and the kids are going to be so excited tomorrow! Here's a peek:

While my mom was working, I was thinking about how fun it would be to let the children sample some Chinese cuisine with chopsticks! So I went shopping!

We'll be snacking on Chicken Fried Rice, Chow Mein Noodles, Egg Rolls, Oranges (for good luck), and Sweet and Sour Noodles with chopsticks! I purposefully chose foods with different textures so that we could "play" with our chopsticks. We'll top off our little buffet by completing Jennifer's Fortune Cookie Graphing activity at her amazing blog, First Grade Blue Skies, and then see what our fortunes will be for the year! By the way...she also has a "Learn About Chinese New Year" pack available on TpT and Teacher's Notebook...worth every penny! :)

Hope everyone had a fabulous weekend!

Jenn