Sunrise Learning Lab: Advent

Recently, we were mailed a really neat little book to review,

Joy to the World: Advent Activities for Your Family, by Kathleen M. Basi

Source: liguori.org via Colleen a.k.a. Pinterest Mama on Pinterest

Written from a Roman Catholic perspective, it is perfect for all Christian families who want to prepare their homes for the coming of Christ and the Christmas Season. This lovely book helps families, especially those with young children, to redirect their energies on celebrating Advent.

The approach of the book highlights three key concepts for Advent, namely:

The Advent Calendar, the Evening Ritual, and the Good Deeds Manager.

Advent calendar:

The Advent Calendar organizes activities into four categories:

Service, Spiritual Growth, "Homebody," and Pure Fun!

Included in the book is a great sample Advent Calendar.

Each day, it lists an activity as well as the category for the activity.

For example:

Day 1 Activity:

Make Christmas cards for grandparents.

(Homebody)

Day 2 Activity:

Make Jesus’ Manger.

(Homebody & Spiritual Growth)

Day 3 Activity:

Make candy.

(Pure Fun!)

Under the Pure fun section, Kathleen explains how a family can include some of the secular fun for little ones, including Santa. If you have ever grappled with how to include the secular fun parts of the holiday with the Christian religious aspects of the holiday, you will love this book, as it keeps things in perspective, that it is fine to have pure family fun, whether you are making Rudolph ornaments, decorating gingerbread houses, or singing songs about Santa, Frosty, and the others but then, to make sure that as a family, the emphasis comes back to the religious meaning and aims towards developing spiritual growth in all family members…that is key.

Evening Ritual:

This includes both the Advent wreath and the Jesse tree

Features easy-to-understand versions of Scriptures.

Children will love these and will find them easy to understand.

We are really excited about making a Jesse Tree! We have not made one before, so it will be nice to integrate that into our family’s nightly Advent routine.

Good Deeds Manger:

This involves having all family members, young and old alike, prepare for the coming of Jesus Christ.

Since Advent is here, plan to update you as we do different activities from this book.
Have set up an entire Advent Calendar Board on Pinterest so if you want to see our Advent activities in progress, please be sure to check out my Pinterest Advent Calendar Ideas Board.

The timing of receiving this book is amazing, as our family really wants to focus our attention on Advent and spending time explaining to the boys that Jesus is the reason for this season. If you are interested in purchasing this book, you can order it through Liguori Publications.

Joy to the World: Advent Activities for Your Family is also available through Amazon.com

Thanks to Kathleen for putting her heart into writing this insightful and inspiring book!

Also, please keep Kathleen in your prayers. She is expecting a baby due in mid-December and is hoping to make it to term with this active little one!

What joy…to have a new little one who will arrive in time for Christmas! Wow!!! Awesome!!!

Kathleen has a very inspiring blog called So Much to Say, So Little Time.

Kathleen describes her blog as Life at the intersection of Faith, parenting, and the written word.

When you know that that is her mantra for her blog, it is not a surprise that her book, Joy to the World: Advent Activities for Your Family also touches upon Faith, family, and the day-to-day, in this case, the day-to-day during Advent.

Please be sure to pop by and tell Kathleen that you read this review of her nice book and to wish her and her family well on her new baby-to-be!

We have been busy here, cheerfully decorating and putting out materials for the Christmas season.
So far, we have put up our tree and have started to decorate it...

We also have put some Christmas themed works on our shelves in our homeschool room, and have laid out our two town scenes...the little Town of Bethlehem and our Old Fashioned Christmas Town.

Here are some photos of some of what we have been up to so far for the holidays...

Estimation, counting, sorting, patterning, more and less work for math using chocolates. Both boys loved doing a variety of math work using these chocolate filled containers...

Little Bro attempting to estimate how long he is "in jingle bells"...he was trying to show how big he is by comparing the length of the jungle bell strand with his length...he eventually realized that it would be helpful to lay down next to the jingle bells, instead of having the jingle bells on top of him. He had a great time using the jingle bells.

Little Bro working with a strand of jingle bells. He counted the number of bells attached to the strand and then, used the beads and the wooden numbers to show the total (21). He then measured the length of the jingle bell strand. He loved doing both of these math works...when he wrapped up the math, he then had a blast playing with the strand of jingle bells.
For more cool jingle bell ideas, please be sure to pop over and read Jackie's post at Ready, Set, Read! about Jingle Bells and then, check out the jungle bell shakers that she made and then, pop on over to see Little Wonder's Days neat post about Jingle Bells creations. Little Bro will wanna make some shakers for sure when he sees how nice they look on these two blogs!!!


Big Bro doing gift wrap work. This is actually such a nice work extension, as he had to measure the boxes to determine which pre-cut piece of paper would best match the size of the box (for control of error, only one piece of paper fit per box).He then had to wrap the boxes, tape them closed, and then, had work at stacking the boxes.

As an added challenge to this work, he had to tie a bow that was attached to an elastic band and then, had to figure a way to carefully stack the boxes so that they would all fit together only using one bow. This was very challenging for him but he loved doing this work. 12/15 Update to this post: Big Bro's friend from Raccoon School tried this work and loved it too.

Big Bro and Little Bro both enjoyed doing this Hershey's Kisses Addition Book. How fun to get to use chocolate candy kisses as they did their math work. Big Bro did the more complex addition problems near the end of the book. Big Bro also helped at showing Little Bro how to do the various addition problems throughout the book. Both boys enjoy doing math and eating chocolate, so this was a fun math activity...seemed to fit in nicely, as we had lots of chocolate on hand for our cookie baking and gingerbread house decorating...we also got to watch a biography about Milton S. Hershey and how the candy got its name, as Big Bro has been learning and reading biographies. Did you know how the kisses got their name? According to both this book and the biography we watched about Milton S. Hershey, the machine that these candies were manufactured on made a sound that sounded like "smooch" , "smooch", "smooch", so Milton Hershey thought of the name kisses. Here is a link to all things Hershey for you...yummy!!!

Little Bro doing pouring work, using a Christmas themed pitcher.

Big Bro doing World Stamps sorting work. As an extension, this time, he needs to find a stamp that corresponds to whatever countries we have studied up to that point as part of our Around the World in December activities. He has a good time checking out all of the different stamps.

Little Bro doing some hammering, pretending to be one of Santa's elves.

Counting work for Little Bro using bows and a number line.

Part of our Little Town of Bethlehem scene.

A photo of our Old Fashioned Christmas Town scene...

Knit finger puppets for the holidays. Both boys like to act out the stories we read together using these finger puppets. They also like to write and put on their own shows...

Both boys have also had fun over the weekend using our sensory table we have on our lanai, although the are hoping that the temps warm up, as it has been a little on the chilly side for us here in the Sunshine State the last few days. A huge thanks to Mari-Ann from Counting Coconuts, as she always has awesome ideas for sensory bins. She is the real inspiration for me to have ever even tried to include sensory bins in our day-to-day, as when I was reading her blog one day, the boys saw the cool sensory bins she had for that month and asked if we could please have something like that for their work. Since Big Bro and Little Bro are a bit older than her son, in addition to our table being a themed sensory area, we are also using our table as a fun way to practice spelling. So, for this month, Big Bro has to sort through the sensory table and find the black and white tile letters to spell Christmas themed words from a word list. Little Bro has to find the beginning sounds for various words.

Little Bro selected this ornament as his special ornament for this year. He got to select it at the store and got to place it on the tree. Before Christmas comes, Dear Hubby and I will relocate his ornament, along with a funny glass pickle ornament and the boys will have to find their special ornament, along with the glass pickle, on Christmas Eve for a special Christmas Eve present. This is a little twist on the German tradition of the Christmas Pickle ornament hunt. Dear Hubby's family had a Christmas pickle on their tree, so part of our new tradition is from Dear Hubby's family tradition...

Big Bro selected this ornament as his special ornament for this year. He will look for this ornament and the Christmas pickle ornament on Christmas Eve.

Little Bro has been enjoying his new Little People Nativity set. In addition to these figures, the set features the Three Kings / Three Wise Men, the animals, and a shepherd. I made three part cards for him to use with this set. Will take some photos of Little Bro using these cards and doing this work sometime this week.

Transfer work for Little Bro. He selects the items to transfer, along with the plate and the tweezers he wishes to use for his work...

We have also been doing some of the neat Christmas Around the World activities suggested in the
Expedition Earth materials made by Erica at Confessions of a Homeschooler.
If you have not seen Erica's awesome Expedition Earth material, please be sure to take a look.
I ordered it as a pdf and have been very happy with it.
Big Bro and Little Bro are enjoying doing the various activities that she suggests as part of Christmas Around the World. She suggests using Children Like Me and Christmas Around the World, so we are doing just that.

This is a neat collection of Advent stories. We are reading one per night.

Well, that is what we are up to here in the Sunshine State.
Hope that all of you are enjoying your days in December.

Here is a link to My Montessori Journey's post about her December classroom activities. There are many neat ones that you may want to try in your classroom or homeschool.

Please be sure to visit Deb over at Living Montessori Now to see her post about turning Christmas crafts into Montessori activities.

In her post, Deb gives links to cool Advent and Christmas craft inspirations from some other neat blogs...so a big shout out not only to Deb at Living Montessori Now, but also, to all of these other crafty ladies who have shared some neat holiday themed fun on their respective blogs:

let's go fly a kite

Oopsey Daisy

Blissfully Domestic

A Little Learning for Two

Play and Learn with Dana

Playful Craft Creations

My post is linked up with the Montessori Monday posts at One Hook Wonder. Please be sure to pop over to One Hook Wonder to check out her nice Montessori inspired blog post, along with a great giveaway she is doing for Advent.

It is a cool wooden spiral Advent ring...here is what she is giving away:
"the spiral ring, 1 brass candle holder for the last spot, and 23 pegs on which you can glue stars, hearts, or whatever you desire"...