Holiday Activity Calendars
December is such a fun time of the year. No matter what or how you celebrate, you will no doubt be surrounded by activities, visuals, opportunities and gatherings that are out of your regular routine. It can be fast-paced and sometimes overwhelming, and this is why I love a good holiday activity calendar! It helps to put a plan in place, and you can make it as simple or as complicated as you want.
Our family has a traditional advent calendar in the form of an ornament tree that we start on December 1 and leads us up to Christmas Day. Ours is something we made as a family when my first baby was born, it’s called A Meaningful Christmas. Each person is responsible for making 24 of the same ornament that represents one of the days. Then, everyone gets together for an exchange and you leave with 24 ornaments that represent each day of the advent season. It’s a really neat experience! It helps tell the story of why we personally celebrate Christmas. It’s been very meaningful as the years have gone on (14 years this year), and each year we usually have to glue some ornament pieces together or fix some things, but it has become such a special tradition for our family. I had a desire to create traditions before my kids were born, but I’ve honestly been surprised at how much they love, remember and want these traditions each year.
Along with our advent calendar, we also do an activity calendar where we highlight a fun activity each day (again, starting December 1 and ending December 25). Sometimes this is a small activity such as making paper chains for the tree, putting on candy canes, or coloring a Christmas coloring page to bigger activities such as a Christmas light scavenger hunt, a hot chocolate movie night or making reindeer food. If we have a couple of outings or special events planned, I add these in as well (Santa visit, polar express ride, special family dinner, etc.). Many of the daily activities we do are very language rich activities. The vocabulary, questions, sequencing of activities, recall…you can really make these situations into great learning opportunities. We have put together a speech and language holiday activity calendar here. Most of these are pulled from the ones I do each year!
How does it work? Well, first you need a calendar. This can be as simple as a paper calendar you make online to something you find in the store. Here is a picture of mine I have had for years. I think I found it at Target or Homegoods.
Here are a few others I found online. Since ours has a door, we do usually add a small treat like a Hershey kiss with the activity for the day. It looks like many of the Christmas countdown calendars online are prefilled. Some are even themed!
Wooden Christmas Calendar
I have printed out my activities and reuse them each year. We don’t always use it (for example we aren’t doing a polar express train ride this year), but it’s there if I ever need it. I just printed it out on a sheet of paper and cut it into strips for each activity. It probably would have been great to laminate them, but I didn’t and mine look beautifully worn :). I don’t prefill my calendar because one, I don’t want my kids to look ahead, and two, I’m not always sure what we are going to have time for (especially if it’s not a scheduled event). So, on the days where it’s just a really busy day, I can throw in the “read a holiday book” or “hang candy canes on the tree.” Sometimes I get it in the night before and they can check in the morning and look forward to it, and sometimes it makes it in there right before I tell them to open it up. It just depends on our day! Either way, my kids love it and look forward to it.
If you have littles, just the act of opening up each day is filled with so many language opportunities. You can count the days, “open” the door, what’s “inside,” take it “out,” “close” the door, and do the activity. You have 25 days of this same routine, and we all know repetition is so great! You can predict the activity for the day or recall yesterday’s activity with older kids. There really are so many language opportunities!
Traditions really are something that kids will remember and most likely carry on with their own families. They can be as simple or elaborate as you want to make them, and I really believe that if you’re participating in it with them and making it meaningful, it doesn’t matter which it is.
We hope our Holiday Language Activity Calendar can make it simple and give you some ideas, but you can use it as a template and add to/take away for whatever works for your family!
Have fun and enjoy this special month!
