Child-Friendly Recipes for Chinese New Year

This year's lunar new year begin Feb. 10, so here are some recipes to help you celebrate. These are all foods that are easy enough that children can help make them and include foods that most Western children are willing to eat.








Birthday Noodles with Peanut Sauce

2 Tablespoons of smooth natural peanut butter
1/4 cup of hot water
3 tablespoons of soy sauce
1 teaspoon of honey
4 cups of cooked spaghetti
2 green onions, thinly sliced
chopped peanuts for garnish

In a small mixing bowl, stir together the peanut butter, water, honey, and soy sauce.
Stir mixture into cold, cooked noodles and sprinkle each serving with the green onions and clopped peanuts.
Eat with chopsticks.

The recipe for Dragon Eggs from Jan Brett's website:
http://www.janbrett.com/dragon_eggs_recipe_and_coloring_page.htm

Cucumber Salad with Spicy Dressing

1 tsp. soy sauce

1 T. white vinegar

1 T. sugar

2 tsp. sesame-seed oil

1/4 tsp. Tabasco

1/2 tsp. salt

2 large cucumbers, peeled and sliced thin

Combine soy sauce, vinegar, sugar, oil, Tabasco, and salt. Mix well. Add the cucumbers and stir until they are well coated with dressing. Chill until you are ready to serve.


The following step-by-step photos of how to make wontons, were made for Blaze's display board about China for the Homeschool Social Studies Fair:


Wontons

1 pound cooked, crumbed, ground chicken

2 Tablespoons sugar

2 Tablespoons soy sauce

2 Tablespoons water

2 Tablespoons sliced, green onions

vegetable oil

one package of wonton wrappers (sold in the produce section of most grocery stores)



1. Mix


2. Fill


3. Fold and seal (a little water works like glue to seal the edges of the wonton wrapper)


4. Pinch


5. Fry


6. Enjoy

The Homeschool Social Studies Fair

This afternoon, the Tallahassee Homeschool Group held a Social Studies Fair at the public library. Blaze chose China as his subject, so we have been reading about China, watching movies, and building the display he took to the fair today.





Part of the display was a chance for people to use chopsticks to move yarn "noodles" from a take-out box to a bowl.



There were regular chopsticks for the older children to try and chopsticks with special clips for the younger children.



There were, also, paper dragons to play with.



Blaze did not give an oral presentation (he just wasn't comfortable with that idea), but several other children did.







Originally, Blaze's display was going to include a model of The Great Wall of China, but the model is taking longer to build that I anticipated. He's going to keep working on it, but it didn't go with us today.

Unplugged Challenge: Ball

This week's "Unplugged Challenge" at http://www.unplugyourkids.com/ was "Ball". Since it is also Chinese New Year, we used little wooden balls to make a painting that is supposed to look like fireworks.

We started by lining a plastic box with black construction paper. The black was chosen to look like the night sky.



Then I squirted little blobs of paint in various spots on the paper. We used red, silver glitter, and glow-in-the-dark paint.



Next Blaze placed two small wooden balls in the box, and tipping the box back and forth, rolled the balls through the paint, until he decided his picture was finished.











Also, in honor of the Chinese New Year we will be reading this book today:





PBS Kids also has a selection of Chinese New Year, Sagwa themed games:

http://pbskids.org/sagwa/games/countdown/index.html

Chinese Lantern Candle

Chinese lantern style candles made with yellow and red beeswax sheets:











Be gentle when working with beeswax sheets, they rip pretty easily, but they can also be squished back together easily.

Foods For Chinese New Years

Chinese New Year is January 26 this year, which will be the start of the year of the Ox.




Since we won't be doing as much to celebrate this year as we did last year (last year we were studying China), I am posting some of last year's projects.

We used the recipe for Dragon Eggs from Jan Brett's website and colored the picture of the dragon on the recipe before gluing the printed page into Blaze's logbook.

http://www.janbrett.com/dragon_eggs_recipe_and_coloring_page.htm



This is the finished product



This is Nika admiring the beauty of the peeled egg shell.




Cucumber Salad with Spicy Dressing

1 tsp. soy sauce

1 T. white vinegar

1 T. sugar

2 tsp. sesame-seed oil

1/4 tsp. Tabasco

1/2 tsp. salt

2 large cucumbers, peeled and sliced thin

Combine soy sauce, vinegar, sugar, oil, Tabasco, and salt. Mix well. Add the cucumbers and stir until they are well coated with dressing. Chill until you are ready to serve.