5 Best Lunar New Year Crafts for Kids with Free Printables
Celebrate this holiday with these 5 easy-to-make Lunar New Year crafts at home or in your classroom with your kids!
Lunar New Year, also known as Chinese New Year and Spring Festival, is celebrated across many Asian countries, including China, Korea, Thailand, and Vietnam. As Asian communities immigrated to countries like the United States and Canada, they carried their traditions with them, blending them with local customs to create new cultural celebrations. Today, Lunar New Year is honored in unique ways around the world.
2025 marks the Year of the Snake, with Lunar New Year falling on January 29th, 2025. 🎉
Chinese Lantern
Materials you’ll need:
paper, scissors, stapler, glue or tape
Directions:
Cut a one-inch-wide strip from the short end of the paper. It will be used as the handle.
2. Fold the paper in half along the long side. Use your ruler to draw a line one inch from the open edge along the long side. This line marks where you will stop cutting.
3. Cut a series of lines through the folded part of the paper through the opposite edge, and stop at the line you just drew. Allow at least one inch between each cut.
4. Unfold the paper and smooth it out. Then bring the short sides together and tape/glue/staple the gray areas together. Add the handle on the top as well.
2. Spring Couplets
Couplets are like poems or signs, calling out happy wishes and asking for good luck. Chinese people hang them around the doorways.
Click on the pictures below to get free printables of Chinese spring couplets. You can print them on red construction paper or regular paper and then color the background. You can use calligraphy pens, paint brushes, markers, or any coloring tools to trace the characters.
3. Red Envelopes
The red envelope is a symbol of the Lunar New Year, and it’s also the best part of the Lunar New Year for many children. The bright red color of the red envelope stands for luck and prosperity, and children receive it with lucky money inside.
You can print this template with red construction paper, or use a regular paper and then color it in bright RED!
4. Dragon Puppet
Make a fun and cute Dragon Puppet with the materials you can easily find at home or in your classroom!
You can get brown paper bags at any 99-cent store or on Amazon.
5. Fortune Cookies
Although Fortune Cookies are not part of the Chinese New Year tradition, they have become extremely popular in the United States. Data shows that there are approximately 3 billion fortune cookies made each year around the world, and the vast majority of them are consumed in the United States.
As a result, it became a newly created Lunar New Year symbol in the United States.
Materials You’ll Need:
construction paper, paper, pencil, scissor, stapler
Directions:
Print the circle template on construction papers
or use any circle-shaped lids at home/classroom to draw circles
Cut the circles
Cut strips of white paper and write lucky words (fortune) on them
4. Fold the circle and add glue in the gray area (but don’t crease the gray line side)
5. Slide the fortune inside
6. Pinch the center to bring the top and bottom together, and add tape/glue in the center
Book companions to go along with the crafts include, but certainly are not limited to the following:
Great Lunar New Year Learning Resources:
