As a book activity for The White Moon of Ramadan I had planned to make fanoos as a craft. However my DS1 was not up to it as he was not thrilled with the story that he equated to Halloween celebration.
If anyone is interested in making fanoos with your children, Insya-Allah you can find a template here. SmartArk has a printable Eid Mubarak lantern template that is ready to go as well.
Since DS1 was not up to making fanoos, we made simple Chinese lanterns instead as Eid decoration. Here is a picture of a basic one we made.
6 square construction papers (ours was 5×5 inches)
Glue, scissors, tape, some kind of tassel and string to hang lantern from.
Steps:
1. Fold each corner of a square paper into the center. Now you will have a paper with four triangular shaped flaps. Repeat this with remainder 5 squares.
2. Using glue attach each flap to another piece of square. Repeat until you have used up all pieces of square papers that you folded earlier. Essentially this is building a cube by using the corners of a square rather than the sides.
3. Attached tassel. We made ours using strips of construction paper that we taped together and attached to the lantern.
4. Make a hole in one flap and thread string to hand. We used a pipe cleaner to hang our lantern.
5. Decorate the sides for whatever celebration you are having.
We used to make these lanterns for fun around Chinese New Year time. You can make lots of these and attach them to one another to create bigger, more intricate lanterns. Usually ang pow packets (money packets) are used to make these lanterns. You can view a lot more beautiful ang pow lanterns here.
This would be a simple craft to do if you are looking at introducing a child to the Chinese culture . . . say in Social Studies may be.