Mulan Movie Night

The Chinese New Year was yesterday so I decided to have a Mulan themed family movie night.  It was a lot of fun! I ordered in Chinese food from our favorite local restaurant and took the night off from cooking. I ordered it in the afternoon and asked them to deliver it at a set time. About thirty minutes before it was set to arrive we started working on some fun crafts.

We made a Chinese New Year dragon craft which I found at craftjr.com. I gave one to each kid to color before cutting them out.

HD cut out her own dragon and the two strips of red paper while Mr. cut out Little Man's dragon. Then I glued the dragon to the paper and used paper straws for the kids to hold them with. The original craft calls for skewers which I didn't think was a good idea for my little ones.

Then we colored lucky cricket houses. I found these cute bird houses at Michael's while on a trip with a friend. She saw them and instantly thought of Mulan. She also had lots of other really great ideas and suggestions for future movie nights. I think I need to go shopping with her more.

Little Man loved coloring his 'bug house'

I didn't have crickets but did have a collection of insects from some of our sensory bin items. So Little Man got a lucky dragon fly and HD got a lucky grasshopper.

While out running errands earlier in the day, I stopped at an Asian Supermarket and picked up a Chinese lantern for $3, some decorative paper for $1, and some fun drinks and treats.

I hung the lantern above the table.

We also made a Khan sock puppet in honor of Mulan's horse and because we are now moving into the year of the horse. I got this idea from redtedart.

I couldn't find any Mulan movie tickets that someone had already made but I liked having them for our first two movie nights. So I created my own.

I google searched for Mulan movie posters and found a couple I liked for the front and back cover. Using Mulan font I added our name to the cover.

I renamed all the food items we'd ordered using Mulan characters and then added them to our menu. I was originally going to go with apple juice as our beverage and name it Matchmaker Tea but then came across some fun strawberry flavored drinks at the Asian Supermarket.  

When I added the Mulan silhouettes I decided to use purple for the menu and recolored them. 

We had three crafts and then one game. For the game I decided to create a training obstacle course since Shang has to train all the recruits in the movie.

I placed a movie ticket and menu at each of our place settings at the table. I then added our names in Chinese on top of them. I got them from chineseculture.about.com.

I found some Chinese food boxes in the $1 section at Target and thought they'd be fun to put our popcorn and movie snacks in. We also had two panda treats I'd picked up earlier from the Asian Supermarket.

HD and Little Man both loved their lucky bug houses and carried them all over.

After dinner HD ran through the training course a few times. She had to jump up and down 5 times, sneak through wires (yarn), crawl through a tunnel, do 8 jumping jacks, jump over pillows on the floor without touching them, balance on one foot for 10 seconds and then walk heal to toe across a wood plank. She loved it! Little Man followed her through it but was confused by what she was doing.

Then it was movie time! Both kids held their movie tickets almost the entire movie. I'm glad I decided to make them.

Part way through we paused the movie to pull out our snacks and pop up some pop corn.

HD loved eating it out of the Chinese food container.

Then we pulled out the drinks. They were really fun. You actually had to push into the drink to release a marble. When the marble dropped in it caused the drink to bubble up. HD loved it and was so excited when she drank it. She happily declared, "It's soda!!"

It was another fun and successful movie night!

 

For all the blogs and websites that I received inspiration from please check out my Mulan Movie Night board on Pinterest.