Wednesday, January 25, 2012

Chinese New Year Themed Preschool Activity: Animal Memory Game

For this activity, I used the Chinese Zodiac Memory Game from here, which is basically just the pictures of twelve animals that correspond to the Chinese calendar. I just printed out two sheets of animals, cut them out, and tapes them onto colored cardboard that I upcycled.

You could just use this game for an animal unit study also, and even just take out the dragon if you don't like them. Actually, starting with smaller sets of animals is easier for young children than trying to do all twelve at first anyway. It seems easier to start smaller and add pairs as they (usually even more quickly than adults) master the game.

We actually did a bunch of variations on this activity, but the most basic way to play is like any memory game. Turn several pairs of cards face down, mix them up, and arrange them in a grid. Now have the player turn over cards two at a time, trying to find a matching pair. If the player doesn't turn over a matching pair they should try to remember what cards are where but return them face down. Then it is either another player's turn to turn two over to try to find a match or, if only one person is playing, the same player can just keep playing until he finds all of the matches himself.

The boys had fun with this activity. It was a little too hard for Andrew (2) and almost to easy for Aaron (3 1/2), but Aaron has been playing and mastering memory games for quite a while. I'll share more variations on this game soon.

Tuesday, January 24, 2012

Handcrafted Wedding Favors: Delicate Crocheted Bookmarks

Another of my favorite wedding favors that we gave away at our wedding were these beautiful crocheted bookmarks. I can crochet, but since I was already sewing my wedding dress and doing a lot of other project for the wedding in about six months time, I asked my grandma to crochet these for us.

My grandma is so sweet and graciously agreed. I found some free patterns online and gave them to my grandma along with ribbon in our wedding colors. I think she actually had all of the crochet cotton she need already, as many of her friends would give her balls that they no longer wanted, and bookmarks take so little material. My grandma is so fast at crocheting that she said she just did a few each evening and was done with the entire 200 in no time.

This was another really inexpensive wedding favor that can be easily customized to fit the style of your wedding. Crochet pattern central has a lot of bookmark patterns for free, and many other site to as well. The materials to make the bookmarks can be purchased very inexpensively, especially if you watch for the frequent sales and coupons that crafting and hobby store usually offer. Picking patterns and colors that go along with the rest of your wedding can make this wedding favor uniquely yours and give guests something both beautiful and useful to remember your wedding by.

Monday, January 23, 2012

Mandarin Mondays: Happy New Year (新年快乐)!

Huge lantern
Happy New Year! (xīnnián kuàilè!, 新年快乐!)

Yesterday was the official start of Spring Festival (Chūn jié, 春节), which is Chinese new year. This is the year of the dragon (lóng, ). Dragons, lanterns (dēng lóng, 灯笼), and other red (hóng sè, ) and yellow (huáng sè, 黄色) decorations are all over the city now.

The week before Spring Festival was very busy in the city. Everyone was buying new clothes, gifts, special food, and lots of fireworks. Going to the store was like shopping on the day after thanksgiving in the States...all week long. Bringing gifts, food, and money in red envelopes back to the family celebrations is very important here for this festival. People from the city were stocking up before they would travel, and people came in from the countryside to do their holiday shopping too.

Now that the festival has started though, most shops have closed down and the streets are nearly empty. Everyone who is able to has traveled back to the hometown of their oldest living relative. There they will celebrate for several days giving gifts and enjoying family dinners. Not returning home at this time will mean you are considered a bad son or daughter. Our family is wishing we were adapting to the culture and returning home now too, but travel is crazy now with everyone trying to travel at once. So I guess we're bad children right now.

But now that many people have left the city, it is quite quiet. That is, except for the massive amount of firecrackers (biān pào, 鞭炮) and fireworks (yān huā, 烟花) going off almost all of the time. Last night (the actual evening of their new year day, instead of new years eve like we celebrate in the West) they lit off tons of fireworks at midnight and periodically all throughout the night into the morning. Literally at midnight our windows shook, but the boys managed to sleep through it just fine. The boys actually love to watch the fireworks and get really excited when they are awake to see them. We can see a lot from our back porch as the fire department lights a bunch off each night, and we are right behind them.
Fireworks for sale

Update:
We learned later that we were kind of confused on the dates. The actual New Year's day this year was January 23, but the festival starts New Year's Eve, so people refer to this as the start of the holiday. So anyway, the biggest firework day is the New Year's Eve night into the New Year's Day.

It will be interesting to see what else this quiet/noisy week holds here. Hope you all are have a great week and have a happy new year!

Friday, January 20, 2012

Family Fridays: Our Ever Changing "Routine"

We always enjoy a good book
This was Nate's first week off of classes for winter break. We have been enjoying a little extra time together, but are working on extra projects too. So some of our daily routines are changing, but some are staying the same.

One of the most consistent routines we have right now is our "Morning Routine." Every morning the boys wake up and ask for granola. They apparently need granola to be civil in the morning. Even if I am planning on making pancakes or hash browns they feel they need to have at least a little granola to start the day off right. Now both boys can get their own bowl and spoon, which is helpful.

While their eating their granola, I usually read a chapter of the Word and a couple of its stories to them. We also practice their memory verses and do a few English and Chinese flashcards. Then the boys take their bowls to the sink and run off to play. Then I clean up the granola mess.

January Unit Study Fun
The middle of our days are the most varied right now, changing a lot from day to day. Sometimes we do snack and school later, sometimes we do extra unit study activities for the month, and sometimes we just work and play together as a family. The boys have been playing a lot more jump-on-Daddy games lately.

We also have a pretty consistent "Evening Routine" before bed that is working pretty well for us now. First, we set a fifteen minute timer, and the boys pick up the toys, while mom and dad work on cleaning up anything else that needs attention before bedtime. It was taking the boys a really long time to pick up their toys, until we started setting the timer. Aaron is old enough now that he understands the concept really well and he loves beating the clock. It has become like a video game to him. Who needs a Wii?

Apple pie in July
After things are back in general order, if we have beaten the clock, we have a small treat while Daddy reads the Word to the family. We've found that saving dessert until later and using it as a reward for picking up (and as something to do quietly while daddy is reading) to work really well for us right now. After we're done reading, the boys run their dishes to the sink and then run around the apartment a few times playing games with Daddy to burn off any sugar energy they've ingested

Getting ready for bed, Christmas Eve
Then we settle back down again, brush teeth, and get ready for bed. Then we all cuddle together in our bed and sing and pray together. It's a sweet way to wind down and spend time together.

Thursday, January 19, 2012

Chinese New Year Themed Preschool Activity: Window Decorations Coloring

The boys received window crayons and markers for Christmas, and I think they are a really cool way to practice coloring and writing in a new and interesting way. And all you have to do to take down these decorations is wipe them off.

To help the boys learn about the different decorations and symbols used to celebrate Chinese New Year (known here as Spring Festival), I let the boys color some window decorations of their own. Red lanterns, red tassels, and the animal (2012 is the year of the dragon) to represent the new year are traditional decorations of this festival.

To do this activity, I just outlined some lanterns on the window one day and a dragon/dinosaur another day. Then I gave the boys each a yellow and red marker or crayon and let them color away. Decorations for Spring Festival are traditionally red and yellow. At the end of the day, we just washed the window off with vinegar water window cleaner, and we have a fresh canvas for new drawings.

We are talking to our boys about what these decorations traditionally mean here, and I think this is another easy activity to aid this discussion.

Wednesday, January 18, 2012

Chinese New Year Themed Preschool Activity: Coloring Chinese New Year Decorations

To help the boys learn about the different decorations and symbols used to celebrate Chinese New Year (known here as Spring Festival), I let the boys color some paper decorations of their own. We are talking to our boys about how we don't want to buy or put up a lot of real decorations for this holiday. (Chinese people think their pretty red decorations can keep bad luck away and bring good luck.) But this was a fun activity to help them understand a lot of the decorations going up all over.

Red lanterns, red tassels, and the animal to represent the new year are traditional decorations of this festival. This year is the year of the dragon, so there are dragons everywhere. Since they are everywhere here, we've been talking to the boys about how the stories with dragons in them could have come from people talking about dinosaurs, just using a different name. The boys love dinosaurs.

This activity is pretty simple. I just printed off some coloring sheets and gave the boys a bunch of red and yellow crayons, colored pencils, and markers. Red and yellow are the colors of their traditional decorations here. While we all colored, I talked to them about the decorations and what they mean, as well as the Chinese characters on some of the lanterns we colored and what they mean. I think this activity is a great way to discuss these decorations and the meaning behind them.

In case anyone is curious, the characters on the lanterns we colored mean "love" (ài, ) and "peace" (hépíng, 和平).

Tuesday, January 17, 2012

January Unit Study: Chinese New Year

I didn't blog much about our November and December school with the boys since we did less "official school." We had a wonderful time when my parents visited and celebrated Thanksgiving and Christmas. We did a lot of special stuff together to get ready for, celebrate, and focus on the real meaning of the holidays, and those we're our "unit studies" for those months. There are so many things I appreciate about home schooling, but I think one of the best is how easily life and learning blend naturally through the day. And if we're too busy to do to much of anything, reading the Bible and spending time together as a family is plenty of learning for our little guys.

Anyway, we've already started doing some extra activities in January to learn even more about China and about Chinese New Year. Chinese New Year is actually not called that in China. They call it Spring Festival. But it is China's biggest holiday. We're talking a bit about the origin of this festival and things they do to celebrate it with our boys. We're using some printouts from abcteach.com about China and Chinese New Year. We may also try some of these and other crafts. We also get to experience a lot of things like the amount of fireworks being lit off in a city first hand this year. I'll be writing more about individual activities and the celebration in general in the next few weeks.

Monday, January 16, 2012

Mandarin Mondays: Spring Festival (春节)

Spring Festival (Chūn jié, 春节), known as Chinese New Year in the West, does not officially begin until the evening of January 21st, but the preparations are already gearing up. All of the stores have special gifts on display. People are buying special food and gifts to take back on their journey to their hometowns. Everyone is cleaning their houses top to bottom to rid them of bad luck and decorating them with lots of red decorations to bring in good luck, and most women have new hairdos to start out the new year on the right foot.

And perhaps the part of the celebration that Spring Festival is most famous for, the fireworks (yān huā, 烟花) have already begun. People have already begun setting off firecrackers (fàng biān pào, 放鞭炮) and lighting off fireworks (fàng yān huā, 放烟花) throughout the day and into the night. It is a little noisy now, but I'm guessing next week will be really noisy. This will be our first Spring Festival in China, and I think it will be an interesting experience to see all of the celebrations that go along with their biggest holiday. I'll be writing more about the festival over the next few weeks.

Happy New Year! (xīnnián kuàilè!, 新年快乐!)

Sunday, January 15, 2012

Handcrafted Wedding Favors: Happy Tears Handkerchiefs

In searching for ideas to incorporate into our wedding, I found so many wedding favors that I loved that we actually had quite a few different wedding favors given out at our wedding. But we hardly spent any money on them because we chose to make most of them ourselves (with lots of help from our wonderful family). One of my favorites is this handkerchief for happy tears.

To go with our wedding colors, we choose to make two different sets of handkerchiefs one in lavender (for women) and one in silver gray (for men). We didn't think the guys would really like the lavender ones that much, but you could just choose one more neutral color to simplify things as well.

I had bought a lot of white fabric really inexpensively to use for making table cloths and decorating for the wedding, so I just used a little of this to sew the handkerchiefs. Since I wanted to make 200 of these, I made this a pretty quick sewing project. I cut 9 inch squares out of white muslin. Then I folded the edge over about 1/4 inch over as I was sewing and zigzagged around all sides in contracting thread. When I zigzagged, I sewed very close to the edge allowing the needle to go over the edge every other zigzag. I thought this was a quick way to finish the edges nicely with a decorative touch.

If you had more time, folding the edges over twice would probably look slightly nicer and last a little longer. But even though the edges had a few loose threads that came off the first few washes, we are still using the extra handkerchiefs on a daily basis more than 4 years after our wedding. There were quite a few left over, so as an added bonus, we now have a lot of cloth hankies to use instead of Kleenex, and they are holding up great.

If you could find a great deal on small handkerchiefs you could eliminate the sewing step entirely if you wished. Or you could find someone else who like to sew and wanted to do this a wedding gift or for a reasonable price.

For the next step, we enlisted the help of two of our grandmothers. My husband had created a special letter, kind of like a combined monogram that was an A (for Anna) and a N (for Nate) together. You could of course just use a regular monogram or other small symbol as well. This special letter was used in many things for our wedding, and we asked our grandmothers to embroider it in the corner of each handkerchief. I gave each one completed handkerchief, and the pattern to fit in the corner and trace on each handkerchief. I think our grandmothers were actually quite happy to help and be apart of our wedding in this way.

Lastly, we folded each handkerchief so all points pointed in, with the embroidered corner on top. We made our own wedding programs that had pockets in the front and back for favors, so on the front pocket we had printed the message "For happy tears." Alternately, you could print this message on a small piece of card stock and tie it onto the handkerchief with a ribbon.

A Handcrafted Wedding Series

I liked making things myself long before I was a mom. As we prepared to be married, my husband-to-be and I wanted our wedding to be extremely special, but not extremely expensive. We wanted our wedding to be be about all God has done for us and how He brought us together as part of the plan for our lives. We wanted to make it clear that we were fully committed to this covenant and plan on keeping our vows for life. We wanted our wedding to be remembered for these things, not that we had spent a lot of money for a huge party one day.

So, we set about figuring out how to make our wedding fantastically frugal. We were able to incorporate so many personal touches by doing much of the work ourselves, with a lot of help from friends and family. Remembering our wedding day is such a joy because we were able to have a ceremony and reception so perfect for us, without spending a ton of money.

As I have time, I am going to be writing A Handcrafted Wedding Series. It is my hope that others might be inspired to created their own uniquely fantastic and frugal wedding. I will try to keep this page updated with all the wedding related posts.

Wedding Favors

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