Chinese New Year Party

Last night we had a very fun Chinese New Year party!

We had 7 kids under the age of 7, so we had to try to keep things simple, but it turned out great.

We asked everyone to wear red to help bring good luck for the new year!  We started off with a yummy dinner of glazed almond chicken, rice and egg rolls.  We really should have had dumplings, I'll remember that for next year. ;)  We ended our meal with fortune cookies, of course!  We had chopsticks (cheater chopsticks since the kids were so little) for anyone who wanted to try them out.

Since it's the year of the Dragon, after dinner we made these cute hand print dragon crafts I found from Oriental Trading.  The kids had a fun time making them, and it was fun for them to see what a Chinese dragon looks like, verses the ones they're used to seeing in their story books.

For the games, we used our cheater chopsticks to have races of who could pick up and put the most marshmallows into their bowls.  Then we played the traditional rock, paper, scissors game that's played in China, starting on our bottom step and the winner of each game went up a step until the final winner got to the top step and won the game.  My son even taught everyone how to say "rock, paper, scissors" in Chinese!

After the games we watched Ni Hao, Kai-lan's Happy New Year show.

Then we read a couple of books,  The Princess, the Mud Pies, and the Dragon (that my son's teacher sent home with him this weekend - perfect!) and a book we have all about Dragons.

To finish off the night, each kid got a Chinese yo-yo to play with and take home.

If you'd like to make my mother-in-law's delicious and simple glazed almond chicken, here is the recipe I used:

2 lbs chicken breasts, 1/4 cup flour, salt and pepper, 1/2 cup vinegar, 1/2 cup water, 1/2 cup sugar, 1/2 teaspoon salt, 2 tablespoons ketchup, sliced almonds

Cut chicken breasts into strips (bite size for kids).  Dip into flour, salt and pepper.  Lightly brown in oil.  Place in 9x13 baking dish.  Mix other ingredients: vinegar, water, sugar, salt and ketchup, until well blended.  Pour over browned chicken breasts.  Sprinkle almonds over the top of the sauce.  Bake at 350 until the chicken is tender and the sauce has thickened.

I doubled the recipe and left off the almonds since we had some kids with allergies.  If you'd like extra sauce to pour over your rice, you could double that part of the recipe.

Chinese New Year is January 23 this year!  Happy Chinese New Year!