Advent Days 1-11

I found a great idea for Advent on a blog that I visit (www.activitymom.blogspot.com) to do a special activity for each day of Advent. I used some of her ideas, found some other resources online, and used some of my own ideas as well to come up with 24 fun and educational activities for Stirling. Logan is a little young this year, but these are activities and materials I am going to save to use over again. Next year will be trickier to come up with activities that both a four year old and a one year old can do, but for this year I was able to think of quite a few things for Stirling. It has been fun for me to put together a calendar of activities, because I know a lot of the things we do are opportunities for memories to be made and traditions begun.
Here are the activities we have done so far (days 1-11)


I found some large white envelopes on sale and organized all of my materials for the month. Then, each night, I just hang up the envelope for the next day with the activities all ready inside. Easy!










Day 1 was a Nativity memory matching game. I didn't have the red backing on when we first played however, and we could easily see through the cards to find the matches. Not much memory involved! I added the red backs so that we could play again and really test memory and strategy skills.











Day 2 was a game with number cards. We took turns drawing number cards and placing the matching number of "snowballs" (mini-marshmellows) on our game boards. Whoever got their game board filled first "won!"













Day 3 was one of my favorites! These Christmas action cards had us up and dancing. We twirled like snowflakes, chuckled like Santa, and sneaked like elves!









Day 5 was a snowman sticker activity. The stickers actually came from his daycare teacher and she had leftovers, so I used them for making a snowman picture- stickers for all of his accessories. We added a little glitter paint, and voila! instant art!









Day 6 Christmas tree decorating.








On Day 6, Stirling enjoyed gluing sequins on his tree and adding shiny stickers.









Day 7's activity was a color the shapes snowman and tree. Stirling did pretty well at it, (though wanted me to color some of the shapes for him) but then he colored the whole snowman in with a brown marker. I didn't take pictures of that one.






Actually this is days 8 and 9. We never got around to doing the day 8 activity. One is a people/animal sort with Nativity figures, and the other is a Nativity pattern strip. Good prep for kindergarten type objectives!









Day 10 was Christmas window clings and a trip to watch the light parade in the evening. Logan came with us too, and we all enjoyed watching the bands and brightly lit floats pass by!
Santa baby!