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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!

For teachers to put into book bags, parents to distribute to friends, groups etc... Advent calendar - tell others!

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)

Our Colouring Advent Calendar

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:

Advent Calendar 2009 - UK and Europe
Advent Calendar 2009 - Australasia
Advent Calendar 2009 - US and Canada

The Advent Calendar Banner

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).

Colouring advent calendar templates

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:

Advent Coloring Book Cover US

Advent Colouring Book Cover UK

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!

Advent Calendar 2009 - UK and Europe
Advent Calendar 2009 - Australasia
Advent Calendar 2009 - US and Canada

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