Teaching Chinese New Year in Key Stage 1 and 2
Chinese New Year offers rich learning opportunities across the primary curriculum. While KS1 pupils benefit from hands-on, exploratory activities, KS2 students can delve deeper into cultural understanding and cross-curricular connections. The celebration provides an excellent context for exploring traditions, customs, and games while meeting various learning objectives.
Key Stage 1 activities
Try our Chinese New Year activities for KS1, which include engaging activities designed for younger learners. These include a fun dragon colouring activity and matching exercise to develop fine motor skills and vocabulary, creative writing prompts with word banks to support emergent writers, counting activities and an artistic extension task for differentiated learning.
Key Stage 2 activities
For older primary students, explore our Chinese New Year activities for KS2, which include complete reading comprehension passages, creative writing tasks and discussion activities covering Chinese traditions and cultural elements, all designed for pupils in Years 3-6.
Cross-curricular resources
Enhance your teaching with these curriculum-linked resources:
- Story of Nian with response activities
- Mathematics challenges themed around festivals
- Reading comprehension activities exploring festivals and celebrations
Further Chinese New Year activity ideas
Here are some extra activities to enrich your Chinese New Year teaching:
- Create a class timeline of the Chinese zodiac story
- Design and write bilingual greeting cards
- Organise a Chinese tea ceremony
- Research and present famous Chinese landmarks
- Learn and perform traditional Chinese songs
- Create stop-motion animations of Chinese New Year stories
- Design digital presentations about Chinese New Year traditions
- Write and perform shadow puppet plays based on Chinese legends
