Religious and Acts of Kindness Advent Calendars

The advent calendar activity ideas I recently shared mostly focused on fun holiday-type things you can do together as a family like looking at lights and drinking hot chocolate, but if you want to bring about a deeper meaning in your advent calendar activities, check out these ideas, which are focused on the religious nature of the Christmas holiday or acts of kindness you can do this season.

At Home with Kids has a list of advent calendar activities and associated Bible verses to talk about with your kids while you do the activities. For example, putting a star on top of the tree is paired with “After they had heard the king, they went on their way, and the star they had seen when it rose went ahead of them until it stopped over the place where the child was.” (Matthew 2:9)

Not Consumed has a Bible reading advent calendar you can use to help teach children the Christmas story and prepare for the joyful day. Do the reading and share a little treat each day if you like.

The idea of a reverse advent calendar (see this post from Joyfully Thriving if you don’t know what I mean) has become really popular in recent years to get both kids and adults focused on generosity and acts of kindness through the season. If you’re looking for more ideas for acts of kindness you can do with your kids, check out these ideas from The Moms at Odds. Their list includes things like complimenting a stranger, taking a walk and cleaning up trash, or baking cookies to take to the local fire station.

If you want a printable calendar, check out this one from Coffee Cups and Crayons (as I write this it hasn’t been updated for 2023, but the number of days is the same even if the days of the week are wrong). It includes things like donating socks to the homeless shelter or making someone laugh.

Coffee and Carpool has another printable acts of kindness list where the items are numbered but days of the week aren’t listed. Some ideas from this one include painting kindness rocks and having siblings make gifts for each other.

If you’d rather buy an acts of kindness advent calendar you can grab this one, which includes little stories and missions for people to do, or these cute acts of kindness ornaments, which you can use as daily prompts in your advent calendar.

20 STEAM Educational Gift Ideas For Kids

Christmas STEAM Activities for Kids

When my daughter was younger she had a ton of LEGO bricks, and I’m honestly a little sad we got rid of most of them because there are so many fun things to do with LEGOs outside of the kits you bought them in.

I love seeing all the ideas people have for LEGO building challenges, and I have shared some ideas for LEGO games before, but I saw one on Pinterest the other day that I felt was worth a mention.

This one is for those ’80s and ’90s kids who spent sick days home from school watching “The Price is Right”: LEGO Plinko!

For those who don’t know about Plinko, the original was a giant peg board set up at an angle and the contestant would drop a flat disc at the top of the board. As it moved down the board it would hit the pegs and change the way it moved, and there would be different prizes in the slots at the bottom where the piece would land.

This version from Play Party Game works on the same principle, using LEGO bricks to make the game board and marbles in place of the Plinko disc since your game board isn’t flat.

You can really use whatever bricks you have for this build, and while it shows all the pegs the same size and evenly spaced, you can play with different configurations and see what happens. It’s engineering and a game!

And while you’re playing with your LEGOs, make sure to check out this post from Kids Craft Room that includes minute to win it style games you can do with LEGO. From speed sorting to tower building as fast as you can, these ideas are sure to get you thinking about different ways to play with LEGO.

And if you need even more ideas, check out my post with LEGO building challenges you can print out for kids (and adults!) to try.

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