Happy Thanksgiving!!
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I thought today would be a great time to share this activity that we will be doing with Evie this year in December! I recently heard something interesting, which basically said that you should swap out your child’s books at the same time they outgrow their clothes. It’s a good reminder that their brains might be outgrowing their current reading content as well. What a better time to do that than the Christmas season??
I’ve always wanted to do an Advent Calendar with Evie, but I struggle with coming up with 25 things to give her that I think she’ll actually use or continue to play with. The little chocolates are definitely a fun treat, but Evie is an extremely poor eater and I try to only let her eat sweets after she’s made an honest effort to eat something healthy first.
Books are the perfect answer to this dilemma! Reading is not only super important for a child’s intellectual development, but it makes for great family time and memories that will stick with your child their whole life!
Each night, as part of her bedtime routine, we read Evie a story. She loves this part of the day and always looks forward to picking out what to read. This holiday season, I’ve picked some new books for her, wrapped them up, and we’ll be letting her unwrap one each day/night leading up to Christmas, starting on December 1st.
She’s already so excited to get started and asks me several times each day if she can open the first one yet. So it turns out this is a good activity to improve your child’s patience as well! (You’re welcome.)
I wanted to offer you a list of suggested books that would be great for most preschool level “readers”, that will challenge them and intrigue their curious little minds. A lot of these are regular books, but I also included quite a few activity-style books in Evie’s collection, because she is such an active girl and loves moving and imagining.
Below are some books that I really like, which are mostly all Christmas themed. For Evie, I also threw in a few books that aren’t Christmas-related just because I knew that she would like them.
I’m linking to Amazon because I wanted to make sure you’d be able to get your books within 1-2 days so you’d have them in time to start on December 1st.
Some other GREAT places to look for books: Ollie’s Bargain Outlet (You never know what selection they will have, but I get a good deal of kids books here and for so much less than anywhere else!), Wal-mart, Target, dollar stores (like Dollar Tree), and local thrift stores!
For Evie, I had a lot of fun matching the books with specific days. “The Twelve Days of Christmas” is book number 12, “Twas the Night Before Christmas” is book number 24 (Christmas Eve), and “The Nativity Story” is number 25. We are planning on moving to our new home the week of the 16th, so I have a few books starting at number 16 that are centered around moving and being “home” for Christmas.
If you have multiple kids, you could definitely still do this activity, modified to suit your family. For example: You could rotate who gets to open the book each day, and gear that book towards that child’s age-range, but you should still read the book all-together as a family so that everyone gets some enjoyment out of it!
Have you ever done something like this or are planning to?? Let me know how it goes and I’ll let you know what Evie thinks of her Advent Calendar once we get started!
Thanks for reading! Have a very happy Thanksgiving break!
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