2012 New Year Dragon Craft

 Happy New Year. 2012 is the year of the dragon. Here's a cute little dragon craft you can make using hand prints. I've shown two different versions. Version 1 is for older students and they cut and paste the hand prints and was made by my nearly 7 year old daughter Hana. Version 2 is for littler ones who can't control scissors so well yet and make hand prints with paint. This one was made by my 4 year old daughter Rika. They had so much fun making them. I've chosen yellow and orange for the dragon colors, but you can choose any colors you want. The 2012 dragon is supposed to be black, but I didn't think that was very pretty.

Materials:

Version 1

• 1 sheet of white craft or construction paper
• head, legs, and tail cut outs from green construction paper
• mane and tail piece from red construction paper
• yellow and orange construction paper for hand prints
• two small white circles for eyes or eye stickers
• scissors
• glue
• red and black marker
• dragon template from Activity Village UK

Version 2

• substitute yellow and orange paint for paper to make hand prints

Directions:

1. Cut out 1 head, 1 tail, 2 legs, 1 mane and one tail piece from green and red construction paper respectively.
2. Trace two sets of hand prints on yellow and orange paper and cut out.
3. Glue 4 hand prints on the white paper for the dragon's body.
4. Glue on the mane, head, tail, leg , and eye pieces.
5. Draw black on the eyes, red fire, and "2012 Year of the Dragon" or other message with markers.

Variations

You could glue on dazzles or sequence for scales.

To make an impressive bulletin board display, put all the students hand prints together to make one big long dragon. Have fun.