Getting Ready for Our
Colouring Advent Calendar...
Our colouring advent calendar ready to go!
It's nearly December, and that means it's time to get ready for this year's
brand new advent calendar! Every day we've got a special, original Colouring
Advent Calendar page (see below) as well as new printables, games to play,
activity suggestions, videos to watch, jokes to enjoy and more!
A special note: if you make any of our advent calendars or try any of
our online advent calendar activities and could send us photos, we would love to
share them with our other visitors!
If you'd like to take part in the
craft activities in the first week of the online Advent Calendar, you
will need to assemble a few bits and pieces:
Red, white and green pipe
cleaners; a yogurt pot and a small jar; gold tissue paper; tracing
paper, decorations such as sequins and glitter; ribbon or yarn in
Christmas colours; metallic pens; glue and double sided tape.
We have one recipe planned on Tuesday 1st December, for which you
will need:
Plain flour, caster sugar, butter, vanilla extract, salt, icing sugar
(confectioners)
We are really excited about our Colouring Advent Calendar this year - we've
never seen anything like it before, on the internet or for sale - but to get the
most out of it you might want to do a little preparation before the 1st December
...
What is the colouring advent calendar?
Each day when you visit the Advent Calendar online at Activity Village, there
will be a mini-colouring page to print. In fact, there will be two versions -
one with word underneath for beginner readers, and one stating the number of
days left to go until Christmas. The children can colour in the page, cut it out
and keep it - or, better still, use our ideas for an Advent Calendar Banner or Advent Colouring
Book (below) to make December special!
Here are the Advent Calendar pages for you to bookmark:
You can really go to town making this with the kids! Then, each day, stick your child's colouring over the
appropriate number on the banner. By Christmas Eve there will be a beautiful
display of your child's colouring which you can all enjoy! At the end of the
season, disassemble, tie with a ribbon or fix together with a book ring, and
store as a very special keepsake. Or bring it out next year to repurpose as
Christmas cards, gift tags and so on.
We've hung a banner up in our kitchen with one piece of coloured card for
each day, 1 to 24. I've used two sets of templates for this:
Advent calendar
numbers large - I printed this directly onto red and green card. The numbers
alternate so that you can use two colours to good effect.
Advent calendar
numbers small - I printed this onto white paper and stuck it on top of red
gingham card (I printed using our gingham scrapbook paper, which you can find
here).
I used this template page to size the gingham card. I had planned to get the
children chopping up last year's Christmas cards as backing cards for this
project, but sadly remembered at the last moment that I had already chopped them
up to extend our Christmas jigsaw game!
You could peg the cards to a ribbon, tie them as I have done, pin them to a cork
board, display them using a Christmas card display device, or simply stand them up in card-file style.
Advent Colouring Book
Advent Colouring Book - ready to go!
This is a perfect idea for those of you who will be travelling this Christmas
and therefore don't want to put up an Advent Calendar Banner - and it makes a
wonderful keepsake to pack away and pour over every year with the Christmas
decorations! To make mine, I stacked 6 pages of A3 sugar paper, sliced them in half and in half again to
give 24 prettily coloured pages. I printed off this cover:
I stapled the whole lot together along the left edge.
We then had some fun designing the inside pages. This would make a great
family project for the weekend before December. Gather together last year's
cards, gift tags, wrapping paper and our printable numbers, if required, and cut
and stick to number each page ready for the colouring page to be stuck in on the
day! You can use our template to leave a special space ready, as we've done
here:
More than one child in the family? Using the calendar in the classroom?
Make one banner and one book for each child, and alternate which child's
picture goes up on display each day. This might work in the classroom, too.
The days which are left blank in the child's book could be filled with a
picture of the child from that day.
Make a book each - forget the banner!
Choose a child's colouring to display each day depending on behaviour,
alphabetically, etc
Here are those Advent Calendar pages again, for you to bookmark. Don't forget
that we will also have crafts, recipes, printables, videos, games, jokes - and
so much more advent fun for the family!
We've added 5 new Christmas wreath crafts to the site this year -
quick and easy Christmas crafts for all ages of children! Christmas wreath crafts
for kids
We've got a growing collection of online Christmas games at Activity
Village, and we've found some really good ones out on the net for your kids to
enjoy this holiday season, too! Online Christmas Games
New this year, our series of Christmas karaoke videos - they are a great way to
learn Christmas carols and singing along is fun, too! We have 5 so far, and more
coming soon... Christmas karaoke videos