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Advent Calendars are not just for children

For communities celebrating Christmas the first of December is the time to start counting down to Christmas day, either to contain excitement or to raise it according to your perspective. Schools have always harnessed them for learning through making or using.

Where once we constructed them with card and pictures cut from last years Christmas cards , now we have the internet and the opportunity to use it's power and a whole range of Multimedia techniques to provide content for calendars than can be seen by the world.

And of course the calendars are not only for children but harnessed by a variety of establishment to share the arts with adults.

So below is a selection of calendars I found last year, some available for this year.

Woodland's Junior School in Kent has a global audience for their annual calendar which provides Christmas activities, information, web search and teaching ideas making it a focus for the month.

Their KS1 offering is bold and bright with repeatable colouring and games that children can use at home as well as at school.

Porchester Junior School are all set to start their Advent Calendar
on December 1st with it's links to a new Christmas web site every day.

Fiery ideas offer Christmas quiz advent calendars for KS1 and KS2

Northumberland Grid for Learning 2007 calendar provides a multi-modal text per day building to a Christmas story to read through to the 24th day.



Nrich Have a calendar every year, this year 2008 has making maths activity every day.

Last years offering from the Stepping Stones School has a multimedia example from the children on every day.

For the older audience

Music soothes the savage breast, so if it's the end of a day with a lively bunch of children go to the BBC Bach Christmas Calendar

For further rest and relaxation after a busy day take a look at last years calendar from The Tate, already completely open but strong people will be able to restrict themselves to one picture per day.

From the museums Liverpool has a calendar for this year, but it's not yet open so can't tell more.

Saltaire Village have used their homes to create an advent calendar. decorated windows are lit up every evening.

And finally for owners of the itouch and iphone there are quite a selection of downloadable Apps called Advent Calendars offering pictures, sayings, music and recipes. Prices vary from free to 5.00+. However the Porchester Junior website is optimised for viewing on mobiles so perhaps I'll use that.

If you know of any other examples or have one of your own please add it to this as a comment.

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