Yesterday I showed you our advent calendar for the year. This year we made a special one – a clothes pin wreath advent calendar. I saw this idea while searching for advent calendar ideas and I thought this clothes pin wreath advent calendar is very unique and I could get my preschooler to help make it. It’s a perfect fine motor skill activity though a preschooler will not be able to complete this advent calendar on her own due to the type of glue used.

What you need for this craft:

• clothes pin wreath advent calendar printable
• scissors
• strong glue
• cardboard
• scrapbooking paper or gift wrappers and other embellishments of your choice
• ribbon
• 25 small clothes pins (I bought a pack of 48 at Daiso – see picture below)

So here’s how we put the clothes pin wreath advent calendar together (note: skills involved are in italics)

First I cut out an 11-cm diameter circle from cardboard (I happen to have a bowl of that size so I just turned the bowl upside down and traced the shape) and I got my girl to glue the wrappers on both sides of the cardboard.

Then, I got her to remove the clothes pins from the packaging (fine motor skills):

And count 25 of them (math – counting, 1-1 correspondence):

After that was done, we set the pegs aside and I got her to cut out the numbers from the printable (these are the dates for your advent calendar) – practice cutting circles, concentration skills:

After I settled her down and she was engrossed in her cutting, I started to glue the pegs to the semi-decorated cardboard (apply glue on the part that you would pinch the peg open).

Make the small box for storing your advent calendar dates and stick it on and the calendar’s done! 🙂

The idea is for you to take out one date at a time in sequence, check what activity you have planned for the day and then peg it, while the rest remain in the small holder… until Christmas Day arrives and that’s how the calendar should look like on Christmas Day (see picture above)!

Look out for the advent activities I’ve planned to do this year – post will be up next week! 🙂