Advent 2011 - Activity 1 - 3

I realize it's now December 4th....and I'm just now posting our first Advent Activity. The reason...we JUST did it last night! :) The first 3 days of December were SO busy in our house...Daddy worked a 24hr shift, we started our Family Bible study back up that we host in our home and we had 33 people (including our family) show up! Then Daddy had his recovery day to sleep after his 24 hr. shift, I taught our weekly homeschool co-op class on Friday and then was gone all day Saturday on a Mom's day out trip with some sweet ladies for one of our wonderful friend's birthdays. We went up to Seoul and explored Dongdemun craft market... it was fabulous and fun!

So after all that was over and our whole family was all home alone in a quiet house together for the first time in days...we decided to start our Advent Activity Calendar.  :)

Now, I'm a big believer that advent activities should NOT be a burden or just one more thing to cram into your already busy day, so I wasn't going to try to 'catch up' from the two days we had already missed. But our activities and readings were quick and fun so we ended up 'catching up' anyway. The kids were excited about opening the next day's paper from the pocket to see what we were going to do, so it worked out well that there were 3 days worth of activities to get us caught up and each of the big kids could open one.

For the first activity, we read from Isaiah and talked about Jesus being the light of the world and made these cute little candle light ornaments for the tree.

The black candle template is from the Truth in the Tinsel and is one of the activities you can print out. We cut ours out and glued yellow tissue paper on the back, then set them in front of one of the tree lights so they would glow.

Samuel colored his instead of getting messy with the glue.  :)

Advent Activity 2 - Jesus is the King of Kings! We used the Truth in the Tinsel chosen scripture and 'talk about it' section and then made some crown ornaments to represent the King of Kings.  :)

Advent Activity 3 - Daddy read to us from Luke and we heard the story of Zechariah when he was visited by the angel Gabriel. He didn't believe what Gabriel told him was going to happen, that his wife who was very old, was going to have a baby (which would be John the Baptist, not Jesus...but they go together so it's good to know the whole story!) and so the angel made him unable to speak until after the baby was born.

Our craft was to make a little Zechariah face with a giant bubble wrap bubble to represent his mouth that the angel Gabriel made unable to speak because of his unbelief. Then we popped it! Cause popping bubbles is ALWAYS fun! and reminds us to believe the things that God says, even if they sound unbelievable! 

For the rest of the Advent season, I hope to do an activity each day...they are not always crafts, sometimes it's an outing, a good deed to bless someone else or some special family time doing something we love. I hope everyone else is enjoying the Advent season in their own special way too! If you blog about yours, I'd love to read it, so post a link to yours in a comment or send me a msg. with it and I'll be sure to 'stop by' your blog and check it out.  :)  Many wishes for a Happy Christmas season!

~Breanna