“Chinese New Year” – The Spring Festival.
Back to Our Chinese New Year Page
This year Chinese New Year falls on February 1st and celebrates the beginning of 2003 The Year of the Ram. Below are the links that I am using to create a mini project for my 3 1/2 year old, based on some of the foods and traditions of this festival. I intend to add accounts of these as we do them over the next few weeks.
In addition I have included a few good links relating to the disney film “Mulan” which has been a big favourite in our home lately and has helped give my daughter a flavour of China. These links were co-incidentally posted on the muddlepuddle mailing list and thanks goes to Alison for finding them.
Information
Taboos, Superstitions, Decorations, Foods and an explanation of the calculation of Chinese New Year.
DimSum – some beautiful simple and well explained crafts with nice diagrams and also some good simple background information too.
Chinese Culture Centre – probably the most comprehensive site of them all with as much information as you are likely to need to answer questions and plan activities.
The Chinese Cultural Project – although based on last years “year of the serpent”, there is none the less good background info here to answer some of those awkward questions (you know the ones where the child goes… “why……….?”!!!)
Door Gods and More – with absolutely lovely pictures.
Chinatown Online – two New Year recipes – but follow the links on the page cos this looks like a nice site all round.
Chinese Astrology Site – find out what animal you are and what kind of year you will have. Also gives character description for the horse… good for all those MuddlePuddle babies due this year!
All Recipes – some nice menu plans with explanations of red envelopes, homonyms and oranges all thrown in too.
Taboos – part of another site mentioned but worth a link of its own because all these things would be really good fun to do at home!
Chinese New Year Graphics – some really beautiful traditional paintings.
Things to Do
123Greetings Send a Chinese New year Card 
New 2003
Chinese New Year at Kids Domain – this is such an incredible site -whatever you might want to do is likely to have a link from this site or be directly on it!
Activity Village – five star with excellent activities and, it must be said, some truly awful jokes!!!!!!!
Perpetual Preschools Page – also five star early years learning site.
Enchanted Learning – related arts and crafts.
Web Holidays – an excellent page with lots to do and look at. One of the best of the web in my opinion.
Send a Chinese New Year greeting card
Kiddyhouse offer a page of links, with some excellent follow on opportunites in the teacher section and a dot to dot dragon!!!!
Mulan
Mulan – a disney cartoon – great film, great music!
The Legend of Mulan – the real story
Mulan as a Unit Study – lots of links to use for an interesting project.
