Our Simple Advent Curriculum

As I shared in my last post, Lapaz Farm is moving this month, so all else is on a “bare bones” basis while we busily prepare our new home (which needs some semi-major renovations) and move our belongings.

However, we don’t want to totally miss out on the fun of this time of year, so after much wringing of hands, here is what we have come up with as a Simple Advent curriculum:

1. Jesse Tree: we finally decided how we want to do this. We are decorating a small crystal-encrusted tree (That JBug already had as part of her bedroom decor) with wooden stars painted gold and decorated with the Jesse tree symbols. For each one we will read the appropriate Bible verses. We also want to find some tiny purple ornaments to add a bit of additional color.

Here is a picture of the tree as it is, bare:

2. O Antiphons: For the week leading up to Christmas we will also add the O antiphons to our Jesse tree and do the readings for these. These will be made on round ornaments of some sort, for variety.
3. Spoon Saints: We will be reading about and making spoon saints for the many lovely saint days this month. For a few Superboy will also be making notebook pages to go into his religion notebook, which we will be reorganizing into a Liturgical Year notebook, following the church calendar.

4. Christmas math. I will be making up a Christmas math booklet for Superboy to work on in place of his regular math. Not sure how yet, as my printer has broken (great timing) but it shouldn’t be too troublesome to put together. Any suggestions would be welcome (Steph, you reading this?)! JBug will be busily counting, sorting and matching with Christmas-themed items I will be making/assembling for her.

5. Random Advent-themed activities: we will do other activities as time allows. I’d like to make an effort to do something special for Immaculate Conception, Our Lady of Guadalupe, and Sts. Nicholas and  John but we will just have to see about those. We will also be reading lots of wonderful Christmas stories from our collection, as we pull them out of storage!
Speaking of random Advent-themed activities, our Stir-Up Sunday Fruit Cake turned out great! And we had a lot of fun doing it!
Superboy stirred up the fruits and nuts, JBug worked on the batter,

And Modgirl whipped up an orange glaze to dribble on top.

Final product(shown without glaze):

Yummy!