Our Advent Calendar- Cute & Frugal Project

Yesterday, I delved into Jenn's Advent Idea Box.  We had so much fun with it.  We did some regular school but incorporated this into our Bible time and Art time.  We made our Jesse tree and hung it on the door; pics will come later after all the ornaments are put on.  Our art project was especially fun, though.  In fact, Jacob said it was the "best art project" he's ever done....he and Jaden both had so much fun.  I did too, actually.  We all got in on the fun.  

We made our very first ever Advent calendar.  We used an idea from 4 Crazy Kings, using envelopes, only I had no envelopes for this.  So, I got out my handy dandy roll of brown paper, which has been such a life saver, ever since I bought it.  I cut out strips of the paper to fold and staple into envelopes.  I did all this beforehand and stapled the envelopes while the boys were decorating them.  I even got into decorating a few of them.  Jacob thought it was really fun to learn how to overlap the big stamp we had to make cool designs around the edges of his envelope.  He couldn't believe I was stamping the newspaper at first, until he saw what I was actually doing.:)  Jaden thought it so much fun to tear apart my ink pad at first, getting ink all over his little fingers, but it all went back together, and he wasn't any worse for the ink all over him.  Soap and water, right?  We dove into our stash of Christmas stickers and stamps, as well as markers to help decorate our envelopes.  

 

When we had all of them decorated, I used plain old twine and paper clips to hang them, as that's what we had on hand.  It actually turned out really cute.  

Now I just have to fill the envelopes with a treat for each day....seeing as today's the first day, I'd better get on that.:)