Craft a giant dragon for Chinese New Year

On Chinese New Year, the ‘Dragon Dance’ is performed during the festivities which is believed to bring good luck to the community and scare away the evil spirits. The dragon is manipulated by a skilled team using poles, and it’s believed that the longer the dragon is, the more luck it should bring to the community!

Here, we have our very own Chinese New Year Dragon (created by the wonderful children at St. George’s School in Semington) and we’ve created this ‘how to guide’ for you to make one as well.

You will need:

• A large cardboard box
• Red crepe paper
• A3 Coloured card (white, black, yellow)
• Large piece of fabric
• Pipe cleaners
• PVA glue
• 4x small cardboard tubes

• Let’s start with creating the dragon’s head! Get your cardboard box and cover all sides with the red crepe paper using PVA glue. Starting with the white card, cut out two straight sets of sharp teeth for the front of his mouth. For the teeth on the side of his head, use a whole piece of A3 white card (depending how big your cardboard box is) and draw a large ‘V’ shape and draw the sharp teeth inside and then cut the V out.

• Using the black card, cover some of the inside of the cardboard box that’s visible from the entrance of the mouth. Also use the black paper to mount the white teeth upon.For the other features on the dragon’s head, cut out circles from the yellow card to give it some spots, then cut out two larger circles from the white paper and draw on its eyes.

• For the cardboard tubes, you can either decorate them by painting or wrapping them up in different coloured crepe or tissue paper. Once you have done this, draw around the bottom of one of the tubes in the position you want them to sit on the box (use the image above as a guide). Once you have done this, an adult should carefully cut out the circles ready to slot the tubes into the cardboard box.

• We know that the children under a sheet make the body of this dragon, but we need the material to cover them up to create it’s body! As you can see in our picture, we have used a large piece of decorated hessian fabric, however any large piece of material can work for this, and all that needs doing is for it to be stapled to the back of the dragon’s head.You can decorate this piece of material with lots of colour, you can use paints or some fabric pens. You can do whatever to make it big and bold!

And there we have it, your very own Chinese New Year Dragon, time to scare those evil spirits away!

Find other Chinese New Year art and craft ideas on our Pinterest page:

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