Skip to main content

Our Christmas ADVENTures

Our family celebrates the Advent season in a few different ways. This year we will have some activities that are annual traditions for us and at least one new tradition.

One of our favorite Christmas traditions in the advent calendar that my mom made for me when I was a child. Each day we add on ornament to the tree and by Christmas day it's all decorated. It's simple and charming. I am especially fond of the rick-rack on it:)

This year I have hung the advent calendar in our learning room so we can add our ornament each day as we do our *morning board*.

Another Advent tradition for us is to read through the Christmas story each night using The Advent Book, by Jack and Kathy Stockman.


This book was a gift when our kiddos were much smaller and is a very well-loved and much-anticipated book each December. The illustrations are amazing and each page (day) has a new door to open that reveals the next part of the Christmas story. We read from the beginning, adding one new door each night.

A note of caution: this book can become so well-loved that competition as to who opens the new door can ensue. I suggest taking turns:)

Another book that we enjoy is The ADVENTure of Christmas by Lisa Welchel. It's a wonderful resource for the *rest of the story* behind our modern-day customs, great activities and ideas, even recipes.

Something new for us this year is to create a Jesse tree. I've been reading/hearing about them for a few years now~it seems like such a wonderful way to teach your children more about the Scriptures and the background to the familiar Christmas texts in Matthew and Luke.

I was SO excited to find this beautiful resource from A Holy Experience (whose blog I love!). If you subscribe to their daily updates (and you'll want to!) they will send you the link for the free download.


I've been busy preparing mine and we are set to start this morning. I know my kiddos will love this activity~and I'm hoping it will become one of our treasured traditions.

Tell me how your family celebrates Advent.
Labels:

Comments

Kathy said…
we do a lot of the same things you do. we have a countdown calendar that is a snowman with a snowflake that you move from day to day. we also LOVE and use the ADVENTure of Christmas book, and this year we're also adding the Jesse tree stuff from Ann's blog! We have one other book too, it's called ADOREnaments and there are 12 names of Jesus with a daily reading and then you hang the little ornament on the tree each day. And we do the book thing where we unwrap a book every day. I need to post about this, thanks for reminding me! LOL =)
December 1, 2010 at 7:18 AM
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Making of an Egyptian Death Mask

We are learning all about the ancient world this year with Story of the World I and loving it! We've been learning a lot about Egypt, of course, which is completely fascinating. Most recently we have studied the New Kingdom of Egypt, which includes the story of King Tut. So we decided making an Egyptian death mask in the style of King Tut's would be a fun project. First since it was too cold at the time to paper mache in the garage (it probably would have frozen instead of dried-ha) and it was too messy to do it in the house, we decided to pick up a couple of cheap craft masks at Hobby Lobby. Next we cut out cardboard shapes to complete the shape of the death mask, attaching them with hot glue. Vince even put a little detail on the *beard* with the hot glue per The Princess' request. Then the kiddos started to paint them with this metallic gold tempera paint. It worked okay for the cardboard, but would not coat the plastic of the mask. We thought maybe a second coat
23 comments
Read more

1st Day Back to {home}School, Among Other Things

We did it! We finally got unpacked enough and got our new learning room organized enough to start back to school! Frankly, I was starting to get worried...ha Today went very well though. So far I am extremely pleased with our new curriculum choices for math and language arts. Now, if I could just actually get some lesson planning done... And get the finishing touches done in the learning room, so I can blog it! In other news, it has been a bit of a traumatic week...pet-wise. Last weekend a sweet friend (who had asked my permission beforehand) brought the kiddos their very own little fish tank with two goldfish. Well, on Sunday we noticed that The Princess' fish was pretty lethargic...dead, actually. She was sad, but she handled it fairly well. And we went to the store that evening and let her pick out a new goldfish. Well, today during our school time~the fish tank is in our learning room~we noticed Mr. B's fish was acting funny. And then he was dead. It was a
10 comments
Read more

Door Hanger Chore Charts

My kids have had a chore chart for a while.  It's one of those magnetic boards and they share it.  However, it's not by their rooms and often they (and I) forget to update it.  Plus it's a little bulky.   When I saw the concept of a door hanger chore chart on Pinterest, I loved it!  It was compact, right there were the kiddos could see it coming out and going into their rooms, and it costs almost nothing to make.   I headed over to one of my favorite stores: Hobby Lobby, of course.  They  have these little wooden door hangers for .79.  I also grabbed a couple of packets of decorative buttons for $1.99 each.  I already had the clothes pins and the paint so those cost me nothing.   I began by painting the door hangers (I used tempera paints because that's what I had).  Then I grabbed a fine point Sharpie and the clothes pins and started writing chores on them, making sure to write them correctly so they will clip on the right direction.   The left
17 comments
Read more