20 Chinese New Year Coloring Pages
Chinese New Year, also called the Spring Festival or Lunar New Year, begins on the new moon that falls between late January and mid February. Families clean their homes, share big meals, hang red decorations and give red envelopes with money for good luck. These pages capture many of those customs. There is a dragon dance and a dragon chasing a flaming pearl, a lion dance head, palace lanterns and a pair of round lanterns, a red envelope tied with a decorative knot, a plum blossom branch, and a koi fish leaping beside a lotus. Three pages feature animals from the twelve-year zodiac cycle: a monkey with a peach, a rabbit holding a lantern and a coiled snake. Red stands for good fortune and gold for wealth, so those two colors are a natural starting point, with pink for plum blossoms and orange for koi. The lion dance and dragon pages have lots of scales and fringe for confident colorers, while the cute lantern page is great for preschoolers.
Smiling charm to a scaly dragon dance
Cute New Year Character is the easy page, a lantern charm with a face and big shapes for ages 4 to 7. New Year Envelope and Cute Lantern are medium sheets with repeating scallops, fretwork and scrolls for kids around 6 to 10. Chinese Dragon Dance is the detailed challenge, covered in hundreds of tiny scales, tassels and flowers for patient colorists about 8 to 12.
Make lucky envelopes and a paper lantern
After coloring New Year Envelope, cut it out, fold it and tuck in a kind note or a paper coin to share with family. Cute Lantern can be rolled into a tube and hung with string for a festival display. Talk about traditions like the reunion dinner, the color red for luck and the twelve animals of the zodiac, and let kids find out which animal matches their birth year.
