Children’s Advent Calendar

We are headed into that time of year again. Everyone is making plans, buying gifts, wrapping presents, and eating to their heart’s content. However, I want to make sure we keep the reason for the season in mind, especially with the kids. Last year I wrote a post on the Advent Traditions we were starting with our kids, but the kids were still young for some of them. One of those was the Advent Calendar, but this year we are going to give it a go and I am sharing our Children’s Advent Calendar with you all!

I actually have two calendars to share with you. One for older children and one for younger. I made the first one for my junior high kids and it hangs on a bulletin board at school. (The years I find time to put it up!) It is best suited for ages 10 – 16. I then tweaked it for younger kids and families. You can find both of th]oem here, but keep reading to see ours this year!

Young Children’s Advent Calendar

This year for our Advent calendar, I decided to try a paper chain. You know, the ones we made as kids with multicolored construction paper? You take a link off each day to help count down to Christmas. However, I wanted the paper chain to have more meaning, so each link has an activity, prayer, or act of kindness on it to complete that day. I tried to keep most of them simple with little to no preparation.

To make this calendar yourself, print off the PDF or Microsoft Word file you can find here. I printed mine onto purple and pink colored paper to fit with the colors used in the church’s liturgical season, but you could do yours on any color you like!

This was the first time I allowed Mia to handle a scissors at home. At three she is old enough to start practicing, right? I hope so! We cut a couple of strips together, but then she just wanted me to finish them and she cut the scraps. She said she was making a project for Santa.

When we pulled the glue out, she helped glue a couple of strips and then wanted the glue stick to herself to glue all of her cut strips together. Luckily, I had two! I am hoping the glue holds the chain links together, else I will need to put a staple in them as well. The chain itself is actually very large! It currently takes up half of our window. If I were to print this off again, I might make the scale a bit smaller, but we definitely will see it and remember to complete it each day!

Using our Advent Calendar

Now that we have our chain link Advent calendar made, we just have to wait for December 1st so Advent can begin. We are going to take one link off each day and complete the task given. I think we are going to try to do it in the morning most days so that gives us all day to complete what ever we are going to do.

Do you do an Advent Calendar with your family? What does it look like? Share below!