Math activity for Chinese New Year with red envelope printable

Here’s a fun math activity for Chinese New Year that combines play dough with a free printable red envelope math mat at to work on counting, addition, and subtraction skills.

Math activity for Chinese New Year with red envelope printable

Red envelopes are a special symbol of Chinese New Year. At the lunar new year celebration, red envelopes are filled with money or chocolate gold coins and given to children as a gift and blessing of prosperity and good fortune for the new year.

We’ve taken this motif and made you a free red envelope printable which you can use as a math activity for Chinese New Year.

This article is part of our Chinese New Year activities for children.

In this activity you can:

:: develop fine motor skills as your children work with the play dough

:: download a free red envelope printable for math activities

:: practicing counting, addition and subtraction  

:: find links to more Chinese New Year activities and crafts to enjoy with your children

Ready-made Chinese New Year lesson plans, all in one place

The best and easiest way to teach your children about Chinese New Year is with our ready-made Chinese New Year thematic unit. Join our Play Academy and download a ready-made Chinese new Year Unit.

This Unit includes lessons on Chinese New Year and how it is celebrated; the animals of the Chinese zodiac; Chinese dragons and how to make your own dragon puppet; how to make Chinese-style paper lanterns; math and literacy activities including playing lucky 8s, counting to ten in Chinese and play red envelope games; explore sensory painting and taking a mandarin sensory taste test.

In this Chinese New Year Unit you’ll also receive bonus printables including a Red Envelope mat for math activities and three-part colour-in Chinese Zodiac Animals matching cards.

If you are not yet a member of NurtureStore’s Play Academy, join us here to get this and over 50 more ready-made teaching units.

How to use this math activity for Chinese New Year

Use this red envelope printable play dough mat to give your math activities a Chinese New Year-theme. 

Print the mats (see below for details), as many as you would like, and write a number or an addition / subtraction question in the gold rectangle on each of the envelope. 

You might like to laminate the play mat so you can use it again and again with a wipeable pen.

You can set the questions to match whichever level of math your children are working at: simple counting, addition, subtraction… just be sure to have each question equal an even number (as is the Chinese practice of giving coins) to give good luck!

Then invite your children to use play dough or gold coin tokens to fill the envelope with the correct number. 

Chinese New Year play dough

You might like to use the recipe for Chinese New Year themed play dough for this math activity.

It’s very easy to make and smells like Chinese spices.

More Chinese New Year activities for children

See our full index of Chinese New Year activities for more ideas including how to make Chinese Lanterns, math and literacy activities using red envelopes, and sensory play activities for Chinese New Year.