Counting Up to Christmas

We're gearing up for Christmas and I wanted to have a way for Robbie to know when Christmas will finally arrive. We don't have an advent calendar and our materials are pretty limited (as are funds), so I decided that we'd do a sort of a countdown to Christmas.... only, we'd count up.

I made this out of a piece of project board and some construction paper. I hot-glued the construction paper to the project board (sides and bottom of each, to create a pocket). There are 24 on the board right now. Robbie will make something special to place in the 25th spot.




These are the daily numbers. I hot-glued each one to a craft stick.



Each day, Robbie will insert the day's number into the next pocket on the board (while leaving the previous numbers for counting practice). We will then decide together what symbol/art/whatever he wants to decorate the pocket. He chose to make a snowflake for the 1st because we'd seen our first snow of the year. Throughout the day, we will be finding different ways to make the day's number. I'll share some of our ways of making our numbers in my Weekly Wrap-Up posts this month.

Yes, Robbie can already count to 25, but I figure that it can't hurt to reinforce some concepts, work on some basic place value, etc. I'm very happy about this because I've been feeling guilty about NOT having daily calendar time with Robbie. This will suffice for now.