Advent Plans

There are Christmas decorations in the shops (yikes!) and a couple of other people have started blogging about advent-type things (Molly's post here and Cathy's post here). I'm thinking about it too.

My long-term super-ambitious plan is to make a pocket wall-hanging advent calendar. Actually, I just want to make one of these:

(from http://pocketsoflearning.com/wallhangframe.html)

In my dreams, the letters on mine will be removable, and there will be numbers as well. So in December, it becomes an Advent Calendar. But as I've had this idea for a couple of years and have made no concrete steps towards it, I suspect it won't be ready by the start of December ;)
So in the last half hour or so, I've come up with this year's solution...

An Advent Book!

I'll make up a little A5 booklet with a page for each day, then during breakfast bible time, he'll get to open a special box and pull out his crayons, glue and a picture for the day. We'll "colour" it, stick it in, add some words, and have a bit more story to read endless times each day. On second thoughts, maybe not during breakfast bible time. Porridge and paper are not a good combination.

I like this idea because:
- it involves a box with a lid. SP loves boxes with lids.
- it involves a book. SP loves books.
- it involves crayons and glue. SP loves crayons and glue.
- it shouldn't cost anything. Fits my budget exactly!
- I don't have to have it all organised by December 1. Stapled pages and a vague idea of how I'm going to break up the story into 25 parts should be sufficient.
- it a simple, fun routine to do together each day. Routine and repetition are good.
- we can read the book multiple times during the day. More repetition.
- when we're done, we have a book to keep. Or toss if it's dodgy. We'll see.