Advent calendars are fun but can also can provide you with an amazing number of opportunities for language development! Have a look at our Clickety Advent Calendar – full of downloadable treats that are great for promoting language.
Counting
Advent calendars give you lots of opportunities for counting and for number recognition. Counting the doors you have opened and counting hidden objects in activities are a great way to do this.
Talking about time
Advent calendars provide you with a great opportunity to talk about today, tomorrow and yesterday. These are concepts many children find tricky.
Each day you can talk about what door you are going to open today and what the treat is. You can go back and look at what it was yesterday and talk about opening another one tomorrow. Twenty four opportunities to talk about these concepts help the children to understand what they mean.
New words
Some vocabulary will be familiar such as tree, robin and bells. Other words may be new or just used less frequently, holly and mistletoe. Christmas related activities will provide opportunities for introducing and repeating these words and pictures or actual objects will help reinforce new vocabulary.
A sprig of holly is great to explore (carefully!) – green, thick, shiny and spikey leaves! And if you’re lucky round red berries too! Coloured lights sparkle and bells jingle and jangle.
Practising prepositions
Activities that include hidden objects are a natural way to introduce and reinforce prepositions. They can be hidden in a picture or for a treasure hunt hidden inside or even outside. Lovely opportunities for modelling and reinforcing the concepts – “Can you see the Christmas pudding inside Clip Clop’s picnic basket? There it is! Inside Clip Clop’s picnic basket.”
We hope you have lots of fun with our advent calendar and others too! Don’t forget you can download other free resources from our website all year round – we have uploaded lots recently!
