Our church is using the Prepare Him Room curriculum for Sunday School during Advent. Since I am teaching the 3-year-old class for the first three weeks of advent, I thought I would incorporate the book into our family advent time. The only difficulty I ran into is that the book is geared for kids who are a little older. And I want to include specific time to pray for our Compassion children, so I am working out my own Advent plan, based on the book, and thought I would share it with you in case you would like to join us! Prepare Him Room has three lessons per week during the month of advent, so we plan on doing three lessons a week with my husband. I will do additional advent activities on the other days with the kids. There is no need to buy the book to follow our plan, but if you have older kids, you might appreciate the other activities and the story that are included in the book Prepare Him Room.
For our three nights a week, we plan to light a candle, share a passage of scripture and talk about it, do an activity and sing a Christmas carol based on the Prepare Him Room theme.
I also want to incorporate praying for our family's Compassion kids. We made sure to pray for the Compassion kids last year and we put each child's photo on our tree. I then took photos of the kids' photo on the tree and sent it to each child! It was a huge hit! So this year our ornaments will be a little fancier thanks to Kim's suggestion at Three Little Larks and I plan on sending the photo ornament to each child after we take our tree down. My goal is to focus on an area of the world each week. So we will look at Africa the first week, Central America the second, South America the third and Asia the fourth. Each week I'll include resources for sharing about that region and including it into your advent time.
For our daily activities, I am going to use Christmas Stories for Bedtime, or in Spanish, Historias de navidad para la hora de dormir. This book has 30 stories, so I plan on reading one per day, with two stories on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day. In addition to reading the stories, I will let the kids take out a piece of the Little People Nativity Advent Calendar that we have.
Additional resources (I'm linking to what I'm planning on using via Amazon so you can see it, even if I bought it from elsewhere): Advent candles, Nativity Advent Calendar, Nativity scene, Jacob's Gift, The Legend of the Christmas Stocking, A Tale of Three Trees (Spanish version), Clopper the Christmas Donkey (Spanish version), and the free printable Names of Jesus Ornaments.
I tried to tie in the Christmas books with the night's lesson, but you could really swap out for any Christmas books that you have on hand! So stop by next week if you want to see our plan for the first week of Advent!
About Hannah Hinojosa...Hannah is a long time Compassion sponsor and writes about her sponsorship journey at Because of Shamim. In addition to being a wife and mother, she is a part-time math professor and loves to read.
