Homemade advent calendar for learning French

Making a homemade advent calendar out of old magazines

Find out how I used some old french children’s magazines that I found on the street to make a homemade advent calendar, to help my Mum learn a little bit of French each day in December!

I found these magazines thrown out on the street and decided to make something fun and useful with them, by turning them into little books to put in a homemade advent calendar. Each of the twelve magazines contained a beautiful little illustrated story, as well as loads of other little games, questions, activities and cartoons.

To begin, I cut the spine off each magazine to leave me with only loose pages, and picked out all the pages I wanted to use in my advent calendar.

I decided to use the 12 stories from each magazine to make twelve little story books, for 12 days. I also used two other pages from each magazine, including a question page about the story,  to create a activity sheet for each little book. The advent calendar is made by alternating between these little books and the question sheets. For example: Day 1 contains book 1, Day 2 contains the activity sheet for book 1, day 3 contains book 2… and so on.

I bound the little books by simply stapling them together and then taping over the edge of the book with patterned washi tape. This has the double benefit of making it look much prettier and more finished, but also covers the staples’ sharp edges to make the book nicer to hold and read.

I made the activity sheets by simply gluing two pages back to back using spray glue. I then cut off any edges that didn’t line up perfectly, and rounded off the corners with a scalpel to finish off each sheet.

Above are the 12 books, with their completed activity cards. Once I had all 24 days of the advent calendar, I was ready to put it together.

I bought some brown envelopes that were big enough to contain the books, and decorated each of them with a number from one to 24.To do this, I used coloured paper which I cut out and stuck onto the envelopes, but this could be done with almost anything: paint, felt tip pens, stickers, stamps etc. I then wrote the number in French onto each envelope just underneath the coloured cut out.

Then all that was left was to seal the books and sheets into the envelopes. At this stage, you can also add in a few extra surprises: little notes, confetti, little treats or drawings. I made sure to add all the books and information sheets in the right order, but once the envelopes were sealed, I shuffled them up to make it completely random.

This is such a simple thing to make, but so much fun and 100% personalisable. You could put almost anything in this type of advent calendar: stories, stickers, magazines, notebooks, colouring books, photos…the list goes on. I like the language learning twist, which will hopefully help my Mum learn a little bit more French, even if the stories are pretty simple – and aimed at 6 year old girls!