Advent Calendar Take Two

Typically, Katelyn and I have decided on posting on Sundays to balance out our hectic schedules...  I asked to post a little early this week, because it's a little time sensitive.

A couple of weeks ago, Katelyn uploaded a personalized, adult style advent calendar.  Today, I am happy to provide a traditional, kid friendly version of the advent calendar.  This is an activity I made for my preschoolers (I work at a religious school, so no worries about church and state separation).  We're learning about advent (bonus craft idea: we are also making our own advent wreaths out of plates painted green and toilet paper rolls painted purple (3) and pink (1)).  Four and five year olds are naturally very excited for Christmas, and so far they have really enjoyed counting down the days (only 23 more to go!!).

Materials:

Advent Calendar Print Outs (see below)

Red/Green paper (or whatever you prefer, that's just what I had on hand that matched the Christmas-y spirit)

Glue

Colored Pencils (or markers or crayons or whatever)

Creative children 

I pre-cut all of the number squares for the kids.  

I glued them all to decorative paper and then I passed them out randomly (with the mentality: you get what you get and you don't throw a fit.  Surprisingly, they did not fight over who got the Santa or who go the gingerbread man).  

The kiddos colored them in with colored pencils. 

Now they are ready to be displayed.  In our classroom, we have a "dramatic play" center (play kitchen, dress up, etc).  In the home, we put up a green-butcher-paper Christmas tree, where we are taping up the advent calendar.  I will upload pictures later, when we have a few more days up.  They all love their Christmas tree advent calendar and cannot wait for when we will get to the number that they decorated.

Feel free to save the advent pictures to your computer and print out for own use!!  Hope everyone enjoys.  If anyone uses them, I would love to see pictures of the finished product!!

Print outs:

Or download the PDF for the exact sized documents.

To visit some wonderful places where this craft was linked, see oh the places we go!