Advent

When we moved to Houston, I decided to jump right in and start meeting some people and getting involved.  One of the first people I met happened to be the wife of the pastor of our new church.  She invited me to attend the homeschool book club that she organized and, of course, I jumped right on it!  During my first book club, she mentioned the Advent ornament exchange that she arranges and my ears perked up.  My mom tried to do Advent with me when I was growing up but we never could settle on a good, daily program to get the point across in a way that we all could understand, so I've been on the hunt ever since.  

Basically, what we did was we were put into groups of 24, for the 24 days of Advent and each person was instructed to make an ornament using whatever we wanted to illustrate that verse.  We have a book that we are following that teach the concepts that Advent covers complete with the Bible verses and even an activity to do with the kids to cement the concepts, so it wasn't too hard.  What you see here is what we came up with.  I think that we all did a wonderful job and the kids were able to hang an ornament on the tree after we discussed that day's concept.

I wanted to have a little tree in a prominent place in my house, that was easy for the kids to access so that we could do our little lesson every night.  The kids took turns hanging the ornaments on the tree and filling this up.

I couldn't get a picture of both of the kids, but I feel like this activity touched all levels and ability of learning and the kids really loved it.  I'll do this next year too so that each child has a box of ornaments to take when they have families of their own and can continue the tradition.

Like most families, we have quite a few traditions during the Christmas season, some new and some not so new.  One of the traditions we have is that I've always purchased a Lego Advent calendar for Caleb to do each day.  This year, however, we discovered that Lego Friends, the girl version of Lego, had a calendar as well.

So, I bought two.

Of course.

Each day, we did our Advent ornament lesson first and then the kids opened and put together that day's Lego build.  It was very short and very sweet and a tradition that we'll continue to continue!