Easy Cardboard Box Chinese Dragon Head Kids

Our kids dancing with their DIY Chinese New Year's Lion Head. They were too excited and didn't want to wait for us to cut a hole out in the mouth area on the cardboard box…

Excited for the upcoming Chinese New Year's celebration? Since we're still in the middle of a pandemic, we won't be checking out any Chinese New Year's parades this year…so we decided to make our own DIY Kids Chinese New Year's Lion Head!

Not familiar with Chinese New Year nor the famous Lion Head dances? A brief history.

Chinese New Year's, sometimes referred to as the Lunar New Year, is based on the moon, while the Gregorian calendar is based on the sun.

The Chinese zodiac identifies the 12 animals that have a year dedicated to them once every 12 years: Rat, Ox, Tiger, Rabbit, Dragon, Snake, Horse, Goat, Monkey, Rooster, Dog and Pig.

February 12, 2021 marks the beginning of the year of the Ox.

Lots of people from East and Southeastern Asian countries celebrate it – in fact, I read somewhere that 1/4 of the world's population (25%!) celebrate the Lunar New Year!

It's a holiday that is supposed to mark the end of cold days and the welcoming of the upcoming spring. It's a time to spend time with family, pay respects to your ancestors and to celebrate new beginnings.

I am no expert on the Lunar New Year, nor can I tell you what's "traditional". What I can tell you is that my siblings and I were fortunate to grew up in the Bay Area and got to celebrate it in a full fledged manner! In Vietnamese, we call it Tet.

As kids, we looked forward to being around family, extended family and friends, delicious & plentiful food, lion dancing, and of course, collecting red envelopes with money inside! We often didn't understand what all the different rituals were for, but understood a lot of the symbols and rituals were based on attracting luck and good fortune and warding off omens and bad luck.

The Lion Dance is performed by two "dancers". One is the head and front legs and the other person is the hind legs. They dance to loud drumming, cymbals and gongs (and sometimes firecrackers are lit nearby!) and are believed to ward off evil spirits and bring prosperity.

Making your own DIY Kids Chinese New Year's Lion Head

Both my kids were scared and cried the first time they saw/heard a lion dance due to the loud noise, so a DIY one at home is a great option for young kids who are being introduced to it for the first time. Now on to how to make your own DIY Kids Chinese New Year's Lion Head!

Last year we made red envelopes and egg carton lion head puppets with straws. So making a DIY Kids Chinese New Year's Lion Head costume this year is on a whole other level… But we're up for it. We can't wait to finish it! This is what it looked like after the first day.

I tried googling to see if I could find anything but only found this. It wasn't exactly what I was looking for, nor were the instructions as simple as I would have wanted.

Nonetheless, I was inspired and decided to sketch out some shapes in Procreate, printed them out and voila, shortly thereafter we were attaching them to our DIY Chinese New Year's Lion Head cardboard box!

We aren't done with it yet (we'll post more pictures tomorrow) but I wanted to go ahead and share the print and cut out templates with you now so you can get a head start as Chinese New Year's is going to start at the end of this week (don't worry, festivities go on for a couple weeks so you'll have plenty of time to dance with it!).

FYI – If you were hoping to do this in under 1 hour, this is a forewarning that it WILL take longer (unless you just leave everything white).

We've spent about 1.5-2 hours on this so far. The most time consuming is coloring (the kids enjoy doing this) and cutting out the scales since there's lots of waves (I helped with cutting!). If you aren't picky, just cut the scales out in the shape of a rectangle without following the curves and it'll be much faster (Tip cheat move – I started cutting out the curves only on the bottom part of the scale and left the top not as well cut as it's not as noticeable!).

We still need to cut out the mouth opening, finish coloring and adding the scales, add glitter and sequins, pipe cleaners, pom poms and other fun decor. We will post a new photo, likely tomorrow once we've completed it (update: see all the new photos we've added to the post!)

Grab your free print and cut template to make your own DIY Kids Chinese New Year's Lion Head in the red box below! Includes eyes, nose, mustache, open mouth (2 pieces) and scales. For tips and pointers, see below.

Look around your house for supplies (Check out our blog post on recommended art supplies to have on hand for impromptu creative projects).

cardboard box (big enough to fit a head and some hands to hold it up, but not too big as it will slide around too much)
paper (white or colored will do to print out the shapes)
scissors
coloring apparatus (paint, crayons, colored paper, whatever you got on hand)
any fun items like pompoms, pipe cleaners, sequins etc (we think shiny gold and silver pipe cleaners looked amazing!)
and glue/tape

Feel free to add any other fun elements to make your lion head shine!

Did you have fun making this? Share your photos with us in the comments below and tag us on social media #hellogrowadventures. Enjoy!

Tips and pointers

Time estimate: 1.5-2 hours one day (to prep, color, cut) and 1-1.5 hours the next day to add all the pizazz you want!
If you have two kids, use two boxes, one for the front and one for the back. If it's just one kid, use one box!
For the headpiece, we recommend cutting off all the extra side pieces of the box, except one (which we used to make the open mouth).
If you want a hole in the top mouth piece for the kids to see through, I recommend cutting it out before decorating. Once the lion was decorated, the kids didn't want to wait for me to carefully cut out the hole!
To make the long body and tail, use printer paper taped together or if you have a roll of craft paper, that would be awesome. We love recycling/upcycling and grabbed a long piece of paper stuffing from an old Amazon package and used that.
Color the scales and then tape them along the edge of the body/tail. Any colors are fun and welcome though reds and oranges are popular colors during the lunar new year. As I mentioned above, no need to cut it so perfectly around the edges.
To decorate the long body and tail, we taped on long scraps of paper from the scales we colored and cut out (our paper was brown so the white helps make it pop and match more). Then we taped on long strips of colored paper. No need for it to be perfectly cut. We took scraps of paper from old projects.
Feel free to use glue to attach pieces but our family is a huge fan of transparent scotch tape (we always have like 10-15 rolls at any given time!) as it's not as messy as glue. The kids also don't have to wait as long to start playing with their creations. Besides glitter or heavier items, we used tape for everything else.
Then we let the kids have at it with glue, glitter and shiny pipe cleaners to decorate the body and tail (we use tape to attach the pipe cleaners).
For the head, decorate it however the kids want. My son spread glue all over the mouth and threw red glitter everywhere. My daughter wanted to make a horn so we just balled up some paper in a form of a cone and wrapped it with gold pipe cleaner and glued it to the head between the eyes.
For an added touch, we recommend adding twisted pipe cleaners all along the head and body. We even outlined the nose with gold pipe cleaner and the eyes with silver pipe cleaner and it looked great!
Find something to play drums on or look up a Chinese lion dancing video clip on YouTube and play it while the kids run around dancing – Have fun!