It is December and time for all of our Christmas activities!! We started by reading the Christmas Story from The Beginner’s Bible: The Very First Christmas.

Then Little Bug made a Fingerprint Nativity! I drew dots with a pencil so she would have a guideline of where to put her fingerprints.

She really enjoyed this activity and even said, “Thank you Mama for letting me make that!”

That day she watched the DVD “Read and Share Bible: Christmas”.

We played Roll & Build Nativity. Little Bug rolled the die and created the nativity scene.

She made a Baby Jesus craft and really enjoyed this. She painted the two popsicle sticks brown to make the manger.

Then she glued the hay and Baby Jesus.

We made a timeline of the Christmas Story starting from when the angel appeared to Mary until the shepherds visited Baby Jesus in the stable. We left out two of the cards because it had the wise men visiting Baby Jesus at the stable and the wise men did not visit Jesus at the stable – they visited him later on when he was older than a newborn baby in the stable!

After she glued each card in the correct order on the timeline I had her tell me what was happening.

I wrote her exact words on the paper. This is what she said for each point on the timeline:

The angel talked to Mary. Mary and Joseph go to Bethlehem. No room left. Baby Jesus was born! The angels talked to the shepherds. The shepherds are seeing Baby Jesus.

I couldn’t believe how well she did this next activity!! I was so proud of her. I laid the picture cards and word cards on the table and told her to match them. I thought I would need to help her but she went to town on this and before I knew it she had them matched!! At first she had “angel” and “shepherd” switched, but once I brought that to her attention, she quickly fixed it. She matched the cards by the beginning sound of each word.

Little Bug loved this! During one of the Black Friday cyber sales, I found Melissa and Doug toys 50% off and bought this alphabet stamp set!  Little Bug used the stamps on these Nativity Stamping Stripes.

Little Bug likes to get the tape measure to measure things, so I figured she would like this Nativity Measure activity. She did!

Little Bug did the Nativity Pre-Write pages. She has become very interested in writing over the last several weeks. This is an activity that in the past she wasn’t always interested in doing, but now, when I bring it out she is very enthusiastic about writing. It is fun to watch her growth in different areas!

This activity I modified to change it up a bit and put a twist on it I knew Little But would enjoy. You are suppose to spell the words with letter tiles, but instead of using letter tiles I pulled out this huge bag of foam letters, dumped them all onto a cookie sheet and then Little Bug chose a word she wanted to spell.

She chose “Jesus” so we first looked for all the letters needed to spell Jesus.

Then, she stuck the letters onto a box!

The only negative is that all the letters in this foam set are capitol and when teaching her to spell words, it is best to have lower case letters too. But, I went with it because she was very much into spelling words with these foam letters.

And that wrapped up our two Nativity Weeks!

- Elaine