Teaching With Haley O'Connor

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Lunar New Year Read-Alouds

Will you be teaching your students about Lunar New Year? It’s such a fun and interesting holiday to spend time discussing and celebrating!

Today I just wanted to share a few activities you can use in your classroom, as well as some great read-alouds to add to your day. If you’d like more ideas on celebrating Lunar New Year with your class, be sure to check out Ha’s blog post Celebrating Lunar New Year in the Classroom.

Instead of studying all of the holidays during one large unit, you might consider discussing and learning about holidays as they happen on the calendar. Because Lunar New Year typically falls near February, its’ a great time to review your previous holiday studies and add in this new celebration.

To start our Lunar New Year unit, I like to use these quick little interactive readers. Each page shares about the holiday and has a space for students to illustrate or complete an activity. These pages are included in my Holiday Unit and include digital versions. You can get that here!

Lunar New Year. Chinese New Year Lesson plans and activities. Teaching about Chinese New Year. Lessons for teaching about Lunar New Year.

Teaching students vocabulary words and important terms is another way to incorporate the holiday into your lesson plans. Students could use these cards for word work, in their writing or as a guessing game.

Lunar New Year. Chinese New Year Lesson plans and activities. Teaching about Chinese New Year. Lessons for teaching about Lunar New Year.

Flipbooks are such a great way to make a reflecting or writing activity engaging. Because there are clearly defined spaces, and they tend to be smaller than a regular writing sheet, they’re less intimidating for many students.

Lunar New Year. Chinese New Year Lesson plans and activities. Teaching about Chinese New Year. Lessons for teaching about Lunar New Year.

Finally, you’ll want to be sure to have lots of great read-alouds to add to your unit. If you can, try to use books written by authentic voices. For Lunar New Year, I’ve tried to find titles written by Asian and Asian-American authors and illustrators.

Here are some of my favorite read-alouds for the holiday. Each of the links takes you to Amazon, but you can also find most of these books at your local library. I receive a small stipend when someone purchases a book through my link at no cost to you. This post contains affiliate links.

https://amzn.to/3tby1QM

There are so many fun ways to bring Lunar New Year into the classroom. Don’t forget to check out Ha’s blog post!

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