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.

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Christmas STEAM Activities for Kids

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Advent Calendar Ideas for Kids

Shark Week generally happens in July, but any time is a good time to learn more about sharks.

First, start with some fun whale facts like these from Kids Craft Room. Here I learned about the dwarf lantern shark, which is the smallest shark and only grows to about 6-8 inches (about 15-20 cm) long. It also emits light. How cool is that?

Natural Beach Living has some great printable shark information guides, where kids can learn about different kinds of sharks, match the facts to the pictures, or print out doubles and do a shark memory game.

Living Life an Learning has some great shark activity pages including the parts of a shark, types of sharks, a crossword puzzle and more. Also check out their parts of a shark and word scramble download, and a life cycle worksheet.

Learn about how sharks float with this great activity from JDaniel4’s Mom.

Need more facts about sharks? This fact pact from The WOLFe PACK on Teacher Pay Teachers includes fact sheets, a printable flip book, informational text, vocabulary, comprehension questions and more.

Living Montessori Now has a great collection of shark themed activities with a Montessori inspired twist. You’ll find a shark roll and cover, shark phonics and lots more shark activities Deb has collected from all over the Internet.

Remember the “Sharknado” movie? A Few Shortcuts turned the combination of sharks and tornadoes into a fun science activity. You’ll need a bottle connector for this project but otherwise should have everything you need on hand. Use their template to make your sharks out of aluminum foil. So fun!

You can also do some shark themed coloring with these coloring pages from Encouraging Moms at Home. Or make a cool 3D shark with this template from korkotak. And there are tons of different shark crafts collected in this post from Kids Activities Blog.

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