What is it with grandparents and sweets? When you are growing up your parents refuse to give you chocolates or sweets and insist on you getting a choc-ice from the freezer, instead of buying a 99 flake ice cream from the ice-cream van. And yet when their grandchildren come along it’s a free for all. Atleast that’s the case for me!
When E came along, he was the first grandchild on both sides of my family meaning one thing – he was spoilt from Day 1. And it soon became obvious that during Christmas this was going to get even worse. Growing up I had 1 advent calendar and not one of those fancy Lego ones you get these days. They were the £1 dairy milk ones you got from a supermarket. E on the other hand had 3 and that was before me and my husband could even consider buying him one and he was 1 year old. Each of those advent calendars contained the one thing us parents love to hate (unless you need it for a bribe, that is), CHOCOLATE! E soon got bored of opening the days or we ended up with tantrums when he couldn’t open more than one door on each. And so from that year I decided I wouldn’t do chocolate advents again, instead I would concentrate on bringing games and a little bit of fun back to advent calendars.
Now I’m not sure about you but for me I always feel guilty that I don’t have time to sit down with my kids all the time and work on their numbers/spelling and so I started thinking of ways I could fit educational fun into our daily routine and so started the tradition of the advents.
For these calendars just need to pick a theme and then the world is your oyster. We decided on Christmas words as my little one was learning to read.
What you need:
- A4 sheets of paper for word scrolls
- 25 themed pictures or drawings
- 25 words to describe those pictures
- Scissors
- 25 envelopes (I found kraft ones on Amazon)
- Gluestick
- String/Ribbon
- Fill your own calendar (Mine is from b&m and will be used every year – we have the option to change the picture every year as our children get older)
So for this advent we decided to print off a few pictures that corresponded to words E was stuck on (Snow for a picture of a snowflake etc.)
Stick the images on each envelope using the glue stick.
Roll each word into little scrolls and pop them in the advent drawers – remembering which word went into each drawer (this bit is important – make a note of which word corresponds to each day)
Once the advent is filled and the envelopes are ready, then it’s time to get creative! On each day your child will learn their numbers by selecting the correct drawer, each drawer has a word they read which matches to a picture. Once they have correctly identified the envelope then what they find is entirely up to you.
This year we have popped clues in each envelope which lead to a blocks figure (a cheap alternative to a Lego set that cost £10 for 30 figures from b&m – my 4 year old wont tell the difference!). Previous years we have hidden puzzles pieces in the envelopes or set up a Thomas mini trains treasure hunt. It can be as complicated or as easy as you want it to be – that’s the beauty of the game! It can even be used to help your little one find their dread elf on a shelf using clues in the drawers.
It may seem expensive at first but given the calendar gets used every year it’s not as bad as you’d think. Plus you can make this as expensive or as cheap as you wish. It also may seem like a lot of effort but this actually took less than an hour to set up and we have just finished our maths one this evening in ten minutes. The endless fun you can have with these is amazing and you also get to see your child flourish at the same time without getting into the dreaded homework argument.
The Mum Diaries 