Spring Festival characters — free printable worksheets

For the teacher

What a learner should be able to do afterwards

• Write the characters that actually appear on a door, a red envelope and a table at new year
• Explain why 福 is hung upside down
• Connect three characters to the food or object they name at the festival

Running it

• 福 upside down is the one piece of wordplay every learner remembers: 倒 means both 'upside down' and 'to arrive', so an inverted 福 says fortune has arrived. Write it, then turn the sheet.
• 鱼 is on the table for the same reason — it sounds like 余, surplus, so fish at new year means there will be more than enough. The characters are unrelated; the sound is the point.
• This pack runs heavier than the beginner sheets: 福 and 新 are thirteen strokes and 糖 is sixteen. For under-tens, 红 门 天 年 乐 make a first sheet and the rest a second.
• 红 is worth a minute on its own. Red is not decoration here, it is the whole visual language of the festival, and the character turns up in 红包 the moment money is involved.

These notes were written from general teaching practice; not yet reviewed by a classroom teacher. If you teach and something here is wrong, we would rather hear it than not.