Advent day 1

Priceless!!! This is the face of one VERY excited boy when he found out little elf "snickerdoo" hiding on our TV cabinet.

We read the book that Snickerdoo left us "The elf on the shelf" and talked about the "rules" (we can't touch him and he can't talk to us). Channing ran out into the student home and told the 11 other "big" boys all about our new visitor.

We read Day 1 of our Christmas activities and he's what we did:

First, we moved the little snowman to day 1 of our Advent calendar.

We read "Merry Christmas Splat" by Rob Scotten. It's a cute little story about a cat who wonders if he's been "good enough" for Santa to leave him a present. He decides to be "extra helpful" just in case. Channing asked for me to read it 3 times, so I guess he liked it :-) We then made our own "splat the cat" craft.
We made splat by watering down some black paint, putting a blob or two on the paper and then Channing used a straw to blow the paint in all direction (I helped him by moving the paper around but he did all the blowing himself). Then we glued bits of yarn all over him to make him furry.

We also ended up going on a bit of a candy cane hunt.....quite by accident really....we were playing hide and seek and I remembered that I had a candy cane, so I hid it while Channing counted and then he came to find it.....I used the words "hotter, colder, warmer and cooler" to help him along the way :-) This kept his busy for at least 30 minutes!

We had a little time left over to do some of The Christmas printables I created - this one he particularly liked (he tried to estimate which tree had 10 bulbs on it - typical - he wanted the biggest).

Later, we relaxed and watched "Elmo's Christmas countdown". Channing is not really into Elmo anymore but he LOVED this DVD last year and was excited when the paper said we were going to watch it.

He yelled "I LOVE THAT MOVIE!" All in all, a fantastic "first day of advent".....I can't wait for tomorrow's activities! I'll be looking around at what you did today too :-)