The Advent Story

Today I read in the newspaper a local comedian referred to Advent as “slow torture” to a child he went on to say is a form of “child abuse.”

Teachers are torturing the children by making them count down the days to Christmas were his comical point. 

Well I hope that is not what I am doing.  Each year I try to improve what I am doing and I feel that the children were actively involved and looking forward to our Advent activity each day.  

amazon

 I started this project by placing each of my advent storybooks in a bag.  Then I placed the matching fisher price figure in the bag too. 

Fisher Price

I read this book, Truth in the Tinsel  and it is wonderful.  The idea in the book is similar to what I am doing with the advent stories however the author takes it one step more and the children create ornaments to go along with the Advent story.  

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My partner teacher and paraprofessional and I decided that it would be to much for our large classes so we decided to use that graphics from KPM Doodles and we created magnets.

kpm doodles graphics

The children take home a magnet each day and my hope is that they retell the story as they put up their magnet on the refrigerator.  I had the children color in the stamps and cut them out each day.  

Sometimes we did an art project that went along with the story, especially if the characters reappeared in the story several times. 

Each child made an angel and we added a bag of chocolate to it.  After we read the story, we pick a teacher to hide an advent treat in their mailbox.  (A Random Act of Kindness)

As the weeks continued the children would ask me when they are going to color the animals or baby Jesus. My goal with my lesson would not to torture my students.  My goal is help the children discover that there is more to Christmas than receiving gifts and Santa.  Hopefully my students learn the greatest story every told and learn it feels great to give to others.