Wednesday, December 2, 2009

Advent Activities- Day 2

For today's advent activity O made a snowman puppet using a Martha Stewart craft kit (bought last year after Christmas for about a dollar). These craft kits don't leave a lot of room for creativity, but they are great for learning to follow directions, and O REALLY enjoys making the puppets. This puppet kit was a little nicer than the Halloween puppets...the bag is made of cloth and the paper is thick and fuzzy.

For each day of December O opens a "new" Christmas book (they aren't actually new, but we pack up the books on January 1 each year, so they seem new each Christmas). Since we are on vacation, the opening of the books won't really start until Saturday, but I did bring one book with us, Franklin's Christmas Gift.

This is a wonderful book to introduce the concept of donating gifts to needy children. This was a perfect book for us to read this week since O just chose gifts to donate to Toys for Tots. She really enjoyed choosing the gifts, and she understood completely that the toys weren't for her. However, I'm not sure that she completely understood what was going on since she said that she hoped that the little girl who received the gifts she bought would share with her :)

After reading the book, we talked about how O will choose several of her toys and books to donate to needy children. She's not at all excited about giving her own toys away, and she was very excited when she thought of the idea of giving the children money instead of her toys. She said "I have a lot of money in my piggy bank that I can give them!" We're going to talk about this a bit more because I would like for her to choose several of her own toys and books to donate to The Salvation Army.
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7 comments:

  1. Goat GalDecember 3, 2009 at 3:07 AM

    Cute! We have done some Martha Stewart animal puppets... they didn't look very marthaish once we were done though :)

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  2. AmandaDecember 3, 2009 at 6:56 AM

    Madison did a Martha Stewart Holiday puppet yesterday! I picked up two at Walmart on clearance last year. I love that she can do almost every single part all by herself!

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  3. The Activity MomDecember 3, 2009 at 8:08 AM

    This post inspired me to talk to B about donating. I'll have to check out that book.

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  4. BethDecember 3, 2009 at 3:33 PM

    I just found your blog this week and have been looking at all your cool ideas.Thank you! We are using some with my youngest.I have 5 kids and I homeschool all of them,I am always looking for ideas for my little guys!

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  5. Bende, Zoé or AbigélDecember 3, 2009 at 4:21 PM

    I think donating with kids is great, but since O suggested the money, maybe it would be worth taking her to the store to buy a gift with the money (so she can see how money can be exchanged for things - not to promote consumerism or anything!) and then wrap it up and give it as a gift. Where I live the Baptists have a shoebox gift collection poor families.

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  6. abcDecember 3, 2009 at 4:41 PM

    I bought that same puppet kit last year on clearance after Christmas. We made it in January while learning about winter, snow, etc. It has been played with off and on ever since; it has held up very well- I think we may be missing one or two of the "coal jewels".

    We, too are learning about giving- tricky, tricky!

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  7. AnonymousDecember 4, 2009 at 10:50 PM

    So I just found this idea for an advent calendar and felt the need to post about it on here. I love it! I would love to try it out and figured you too might enjoy it. Here is the link http://www.etsy.com/view_listing.php?listing_id=35098331

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