Make it Mondays are brought to us by Rebecca of Tumbleweed Preschool in Advance, NC. She is always looking for frugal DIY projects for her students and her home. We are sharing Rebecca’s DIY project on MoolaSavingMom.com because they can be used for home schoolers, young artists and anyone else who wants DIY ideas that can save them money on projects around the house.

Chinese New Year means fireworks, paper lanterns, “lucky money” and red envelopes. These are two fun activities I made to use while we are learning about Chinese New Year.

1) I had an old Origami kit which happened to have red envelopes in it.  I put numbers from 1-5 in gold on the envelopes. I laminated the envelopes. Then I put gold coins with the envelopes. The children have to figure out how many coins to put in each envelope. You could either purchase some red envelopes or make them yourself out of red paper or origami paper.

2) I think it is important for children to know that there are many different languages in the world. Of course, my students can not read but most of them at least recognize some of the letters of the alphabet.  Chinese characters are not an alphabet. rather, each character could be a whole concept, one word or part of a word. Therefore you can not take, for example, each letter of a child’s name and fine a corresponding character in Chinese. So, what I did with the matching card game was get as close as I could. The main purpose of this activity was for the children to see another language and English written together. Again, I put the clipart and the writing in a table in word. I printed two copies on cardstock, cut them apart and laminated them.

Rebecca Burriss is an educator of children and avid DIYer. She raised four daughters and taught them how to do make lots of things including ceramics, elaborate doll houses, wood projects and even home interior design projects.