Chinese Week in Homeschool

It may be long gone but I wanted to share with you all what we got up to for our Chinese week in Home Ed a few weeks ago! 

Chinese New Year was celebrated on 5th February. In Home Ed we have decided this year to focus on a different country of Wills' choice each term. For last term he chose China because he new we could do lots of fun things leading up to the big event.

We started off by learning some Chinese words and writing some letters. I made a board on Pinterest (I have a section for home ed on there for those interested!) And got a lot of useful resources from all kinds of places so do check out my board for more information.

We chose some of the most used words and phrases, 'Happy New Year,' 'Pig,' Happiness,' Hope' and Love.' We printed off small  red envelopes and used some special gold and silver paint to trace some templates. We went free hand on lanterns and Will tried free hand in his topic book too.

On another day we gathered some card, feathers, wooden sticks and printed off some dragon colouring in sheets to make a rather cool dragon! Will added the feathers because he thought it was a celebration and so it should have something special on it. Dragons are always seen in the parades and look so beautiful we had to make one.

We then focused on pigs. Why? Because it's year of the pig! We drew some pictures, learned how to say and write year of the pig in Chinese plus did some colouring in sheets. We couldn't resist having a go at some origami pigs. Now, I'm pretty bad at paper crafts but we were both really pleased with how these came out! There may have been some negative attitudes at some points during this particular make (from me!) but after searching 'how to make origami pigs' on the web we found some things to help us along!

Finally, the day of our Chinese celebration dinner arrived! We didn't get to celebrate new years because the boys were not staying for dinner on that date. Instead, we celebrated a day after and had a delicious meal. Will picked out the squid for our battered squid dish at the local supermarket and we both had great fun preparing them ahead of cooking.

Will found this quite difficult because of his sensory processing. He's not very good with anything slimy, gooey, really soft or sticky so chopping these up was a big thing for him which I'm super proud of him for. I helped him fry up the squid later on in the evening and we had a very enjoyable Chinese fakeaway together as a family. 

Happy New Year of The Pig Everybody!

 Look out for my full post including all of our home made Chinese dishes soon!