Religious and Acts of Kindness Advent Calendars

November 18, 2023 by Sarah White Leave a Comment

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.

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Resources for Learning about Squirrels

Did you know that October is Squirrel Awareness Month? I didn’t know we needed more awareness of these little creatures, but let’s take it as a sign to learn more about squirrels!

Let’s start with some fun facts via Kids Konnect: did you know there are five subfamilies and more that 280 species of squirrels? The smallest are pygmy squirrels and the largest, the Bhutan giant flying squirrel, can be longer that 4 feet (1.2 meters).

Tree squirrels can climb down trees so fast because their ankles can rotate 180 degrees, allowing them to grab the tree bark as they go down. While most squirrels don’t survive their first year of life, they can live five to 10 years in the wild and squirrels have been known to live up to 20 years in captivity!

Rhythms of Play has more fun facts and tips for observing squirrels if you want to add some real life nature to your nature study.

We always like to start these collections with life cycle and parts of the animal printables, so let’s grab the squirrel life cycle an parts of a squirrel worksheets from Montessori Nature. (It doesn’t look like these are free any more but they have a whole unit study on squirrels you can buy that includes life cycle and parts activities, characteristics of different kinds of squirrels, a printable poster, information about predators and more.)

Grab the squirrel lapbook printable (free with email address) from Homeschool Share to learn the parts of a squirrel, where they live, what they eat, whether they hibernate and more. There’s also a nut taste test printable, a place for making observations about squirrels, life cycle of an oak tree, games and more.

Simple Everyday Mom has some cute squirrel themed worksheets including tracing the letter s, labeling the parts of a squirrel and a letter s maze. She also has more activity pages with a squirrel theme, including matching, a more traditional maze and a counting and graphing activity.

Work on letter recognition with this squirrel and acorn game printable from Teaching Mama. I love the idea of hiding the letters in a fall themed sensory bin for kids to find, identify and match to the letter on the worksheet.

For older kids you can do this “if I were a squirrel” writing prompt from Lesson Planet.

And throw in a little counting with these squirrel and acorn tens frame printables from JDaniel4’s Mom, which you can use to count real acorns or any other little fall themed thing you have handy.

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