Advent study for young children

Once again, I waited until the last minute to try to get an Advent study together for our family...  However, I managed to pull it off without too much fuss and no money spent.  What I came up with will suffice for this year, and I WILL get my act together and create real ornaments for next year!

What I devised as an interim, until I can make permanent ornaments, is to use this devotion along with some printed "ornaments".  I opened MS Word and got busy finding clip art suitable for each ornament.  I made a document with each the clip arts sized to what I thought was appropriate and printed it on matte photo supreme paper (it's as thick as cardstock).  It's not the best thing ever, but thankfully my children don't really care about aesthetic appeal.  I have posted the Word document I created here, you're welcome to it.*

I cut out each of the items with decorative scissors, leaving enough room at the top for a small hole punch to feed a ribbon through.  Then the ribbon in a loop to make a "hanger" for the tree.  We will just hang them on our regular tree in with our regular ornaments.  You might also want to have a separate small tree devoted to being a Jesse Tree.

We were 5 days late getting started, so yesterday we covered the first three days' devotions during our Bible time.  We managed to not get any school work done today so we will try to get caught up on Friday and then do one a day as we're suppose to.

If you are looking for Advent/Jesse Tree devotionals for your family for the Christmas season, you might want to check out some of these wonderful posts:

* Keeping Christ in Christmas with the Jesse Tree from A High and Noble Calling
* Celebrate with Joy: Week 1 from Keeper of the Home
* Our Jesse Tree: A Focused Advent Celebration from Passionate Homemaking
* Jesse Tree from Rocks in My Dryer (from 2008)
* Advent Daily Dose: The Jesse Tree from Kitchen Stewardship

* Feel free to print and use the Advent "ornaments" I created, however if you link to the document on a post, I would appreciate a link-back.  Thanks.


This post is linked to Frugal Fridays.