Category: calendar

Book Advent Calendar

Published on by nonnativemommyLeave a comment

Like last year we’ll have a book advent calendar, however, this year I managed to put together more Christmassy books than last year. And there are some surprises among the 24 books… read on to find out what they are.

I always go to second-hand toy shops which also offer English children books at a very low price. All through the year I’ve been collecting these books (some of them we had last year too) I wrapped them in red and green paper and stacked them up like a Christmas tree:

 Here is the list of the books:

  1. Dear Santa

  2. A busy Christmas (board book)
  3. Mr Men – 12 Days of Christmas
  4. Mr Christmas
  5. Little Miss Christmas
  6. Here comes and Angel
  7. Dora Starry Christmas
  8. The Manger
  9. The Gingerbread Man (Ladybird)
  10. The Nutcracker (Usborne)
  11. Snappy Little Christmas (pop-up book)
  12. Reindeer- a Christmas Story
  13. Clifford’s First Christmas
  14. Maisy makes gingerbread
  15. The very first Christmas (Beginner’s Bible)
  16. The night before Christmas
  17. A Christmas Hug (Marks and Spencer)

    I also included books on some of E.’s favourite topics:

  18. The Little Brainwaves investigate… The Human Body
  19. It’s so unfair (illustrated by Jonathan Allen – author of I’m not reading, I’m not cute, I’m not scared)
  20. I like it when… (Mary Murphy)

    And 2 books in Hungarian 

  21. Zelk Zoltán: Karácsonyi ének
  22. Télország (Lili és Lala versei)

    And the surprise books … on a new born baby

  23. The New baby
  24. Za-za’s baby brother (by Lucy Cousins)

Yesterday we opened the first one: Busy Christmas – a tiny board book with rhymes about the preparations for Christmas. I needed to read it twice. E. wanted to open the Advent book first, rather than the Activity Calendar. I’ll write a post about that one too.
Today we’ve read the second one from the top of the pile: Little Miss Christmas – it wasn’t so very well welcome but E. liked it. The story is about Little Miss Christmas going on holiday before Christmas and leave her brother, Mr Christmas and uncle,Father Christmas finish the wrapping of  all the presents. Of course, they couldn’t get ready in time. But Little Miss Christmas saves the day with a brilliant idea.

Would you like to get short reviews of the Advent Books we’ll be reading?

Before – after: Our new calendar and weather station

Published on by nonnativemommy2 Comments

I’ve already written a post about how I made our weather board which also includes some emotions too. I’ve made some changes to it and added some more details.

I wanted to include days, months and seasons as well. So I repainted the board (the old tray) like 6 times as the paint didn’t want to cover the black letters I’d written on it earlier. More or less I managed with the painting and on the top, I wrote DAY, MONTH and SEASON. I also made laminated cards. The days are hand-written both in English and in Hungarian, the months are printed but I decorated every month according to what’s typical in that month. I found 4 pictures depicting the four seasons. I printed some more varied weather pictures you can find on the link. In this way, the many sources and styles make it more eclectic and more eye-caching than one kind of template (although you can find several of them online – see links later). Of course, I laminated them all and also added sticky magnets on the back.

The weather display is in the middle and at the bottom of the board you can find the feelings.

On the side of our book case next to the weather board, I printed a monthly calendar where every day we can leave a dot with our much loved dot markers.

Before:

After:
As you can see our day turned bad (have a look at the feelings section -silly and sad… it was true for both of us… so sorry for the poor quality of the photos.
started as a fun day
making a mark
I don’t think I’ll change this calendar and weather station in the near future but here I collected some links of how others do it. There are some real professional ones among them:
Our classroom calendar – from Counting Coconuts
Alas, we do not have such a great wall to use.
Calendar Activities (Photo from Discovery Days and Montessori Moments)
Our calendar routine – from My Montessori Journey
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Free printable weather chart for preschoolers – by Paint On The Ceiling

I really liked this one, but unfortunately the whole thing is on an A/4 sheet which would be too small for us. The design is beautiful.

Weather chart – by Rowdy in Room 300
Easy to use, colourful but it’s only weather
My weather station – by boys GERMS
It’s a showpieces, I love it! Though not for my little one. She would destroy it within seconds.
Homeschool Room Organisation (Calendar and weather station) – by The Princess and the Tot
Wow!
The links above contain quite a lot of free printable materials.

Our calendar and weather display is rather modest compared to the others I linked in but it serves great fun and supports our bilingual learning process.