Asian New Year: How To Make A Korean Yut Nori Game

I discovered kid friendly instructions on how to make a Korean Yut Nori game with kids at TLC Family. To make it easier for you I designed a fun printable game board to use for your Asian New Year celebrations. The kids just need to decorate the game board, 4 popsicle sticks and their game pieces.



Yut Nori is traditionally played during The Korean New Years. It is a simple, fun and quick game to play. If your little one can count to 5 they can play. My 5 year old had so much fun decorating her game pieces, popsicle sticks and game board. She was very proud to play HER game.

We are going to make Yut Nori kits for Lu's Kindergarten class. I am volunteering to help them celebrate the New Year. We will show them how to play and then how to make their own game. I think they will really like it!

I created a free Year of the Rabbit Yut Nori game board. You can print your own below. 

yutnorikoreangame

I also included the rabbit ying yang for coloring if you would like to print it. The ying yang is an ode to the ying yang on the Korean flag.

rabbityingyang

Instructions for making your own Yut Nori Game Board and pieces:

Game Board: Print out template on card stock. Children can decorate game board with round stickers and markers. Mark your starting point by a unique sticker or color.

Game Pieces: In place of a dice, you use sticks. Traditionally the sticks are rounded with one flat side. For this version children will use popsicle sticks.

Have child decorate 4 popsicle sticks - only on one side - any way you like. Use markers, paint or stickers. It is important to keep one side blank. If you would like, you can make a color represent the blank side and make the other side patterned. The player tosses the sticks on the table during their turn. Count how many decorated sides are facing up. That is the number of spaces the player moves. Bonus: If all sticks turn up blank you get to move 5 places.

If you land on someone else's spot you have to go back to start. The lines in the corner are shortcuts. If you land on those spots you get to slide across to the corresponding dot.

You can use anything as your game piece, a button, pebble, spool...

For Lu's class, I bought these little wooden pieces for them to decorate and personalize for their own game pieces.

I hope you try this game at home!

Happy New Year!

Multi Cultural Kids Craft: Romanian Horezu Rooster

This is the activity I have featured today over at Grown In My Heart.

Attention: Tom the Turkey would like you to meet his distant relative Horezu the Rooster. Tom is hoping some time out of the Thanksgiving spotlight might be to his advantage. He is afraid of a little thing called over exposure.

The Rooster is a popular traditional motif found on Romanian pottery, particularly in the town of Horezu, Romania. Using the template provided you can decorate your own Horezu Rooster.

Romanian Horezu Rooster
Download template

Color in using markers or paint

Dip a cotton swab or the eraser end of a pencil in paint to decorate rooster

Sending Snail Mail

Crafty Care Packages: Today we decided to send some of our little friends some good old fashioned snail mail. No one loves getting mail more than a small child. Both girls go crazy when they get a card and a few stickers from their Grand Parents. So I thought what a great little surprise to receive in the mail an envelope full of crafty activities. I printed out some free activities from the web and attached a little note listing the resources so their Mamas could know where to find more paper "gems." Lulu was so excited by the printables she could only help me put them in envelopes and seal them before she had to start gluing "gems" onto her own crown. Meanwhile Emme created beautiful stickers to decorate the envelopes with. So...McKayla, Avari, Sophia, Hanah, Ava and Oliver watch your mailboxes!

Free Printable Sources:
The Toymaker
Print Picnic
Activity Village

Make your own stickers: Blank printer labels, markers, stamps, crayons... Go to town! At one point Emme was drawing and stamping at the same time! Then I folded down the edge of the label sheet so the sticker ends were exposed and easily removed from the sheet. This is an activity that would appeal to all ages. Older kids could design their own return address labels or letter seals.
Removing stickers from a sheet and placing it onto paper is excellent for small children's developing fine motor skills...plus they love it!

What to do with your child's art work?

For awhile, Lulu, loved gluing small squares of tissue onto paper (and then of course pouring glitter on top!) I had stacks of her tissue/glitter collages. After we made all the cards our relatives could stand I moved on to this idea.

I decided to cut them out into basic animal shapes. I think they look very cute plus they are a great way to dress up the playroom. You can of course use a painting or any other mixed media collage as your base. I added the letter just to reinforce the alphabet you of course do not have to. I think different types of dinosaurs, fish, bugs, or flowers would look cute. I included the elephant template to get you started. Print, cut out, trace onto back of child's artwork and cut out, fold ear and glue onto elephant. Click on picture below for template.

I have to apologize, I am not computer savvy. I can not get this elephant to print any bigger than 3/4 of the page. If anyone knows how I should be saving this file let me know. I am saving it "for the web" from Illustrator as a GIF file. *** Thanks to Clemencia at Storytime and More for fixing the elephant template!!!

Free Printables

Cards, Gift Tags, Valentines, To Do Lists, Thank You Cards, Scrap Booking Templates... Download for free at the Kodak website.

http://www.kodak.com/eknec/PageQuerier.jhtml?pq-path=13212&pq-locale=en_US&_requestid=7096#todo