Catholic|Sparkles and Sprinkles

French Advent Calendar

by sparkle | Nov 5, 2022 | Craft Tutorials

Join us to learn French Christmas words this Advent season! We have a variety of activities prepared for you to learn Christmas words in French as we wait for Christmas – an Advent calendar, printable mini-books, fun vocabulary practice pages, and audio to hear the words!

We know Advent is a busy time, so everything is simple to use. Just print and learn a French word each day. Have fun!

Our printable Advent calendar is available on Etsy. This calendar features a Christmas tree with spaces for 24 stickers that become the tree’s ornaments. Each space on the tree has a word in French. The printable sticker “ornaments” have adorable images of many Christmas related words.

You can find the Avery sticker sheets here. The printable stickers are sized for 94500 Avery 1″ stickers. If you prefer not to get the stickers, the ornament images can be printed on plain paper, cut out, and glued on the tree. To easily cut perfect circles from paper, you could use this ek 1″ circle punch.

If your family is brand new to French, keep scrolling down. We have recordings of each of the Advent calendar words so that you can easily listen and repeat to learn the words.

We also have several FREE printables to go along with our French Advent calendar!

4 FREE Mini books with all 24 Christmas words found on our Advent calendar. Each book can be printed on one piece of paper and then easily folded into a mini book. Watch our quick video to see how easy this is. (The book with images comes with the Etsy Advent bundle. The free book has only words, and is meant to be illustrated with your own creativity.) To learn the pronunciation of the words, check out the clickable audio files at the bottom of this post.

4 different FREE vocabulary practice activities to practice all of the Christmas words: a tracing page, a word search, a matching page, and an illustration page.

Click on the play button below the images to hear how to say the words in French.

le bébé Jésus

la Sainte Famille: Jésus, Marie, et Joseph

une étable

une étoile

un âne

les trois mages

le père Noël

un cadeau

un traîneau

un renne

un bas de Noël

une cheminée

un bonhomme de neige

la neige

un sapin

une boule de Noël

une couronne de Noël

une canne à sucre

un berger et son agneau

une église

un ange

une bougie

un chocolat chaud

un casse-noisette

Ready to get the Advent Calendar and start learning French for Christmas? Click here.

Joyeux Noël! Merry Christmas!

Would you like to celebrate other holidays French style too? Check out our posts for

Saint Nicholas Day, Santons de Provence, La Chandeleur (February 2), and Saint Valentine’s Day…

Saint Nicholas Day Shoe

French Nativity - Santons de Provence

Crêpes for La Chandeleur

French Valentine Garland

Note: Some links on this page are Amazon Affiliate links. Sparkles and Sprinkles is a participant in the Amazon Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for sites to earn advertising fees by advertising and linking to Amazon.com.

Other links may or may not be affiliate links. We provide links because we have found these products or services beneficial, and we think you might too.

Easter Egg Garland Craft

by sparkle | Apr 8, 2022 | Craft Tutorials

It seems we’ve started a little tradition at Sparkles and Sprinkes…holiday garlands to remind us of God’s love. (Perhaps you made the “Love is” garland or the “Saint Patrick’s Prayer” garland?) For this Easter season, we made an Easter hymn garland! Would you like to make one too?

This Easter garland has words from the Easter hymn, “Jesus Christ is Risen Today.” For us, this song brings back sweet memories of meeting with our Making Music Praying Twice group when our oldest children were toddlers. Making Music Praying Twice has a beautiful version of this song that young children love to sing…and children naturally have so much sweet Easter joy!

Let’s make an Easter egg garland!

These instructions show making a printable version of the garland, available in our Etsy shop. Our garland is hand-lettered and ready to color! The garland on Etsy has illustrations to go along with the song verses, plus blank eggs so that you can be creative and add your own drawings. However, you can make your own in a similar way. Simply cut egg shapes from cardstock, write verses from the song on some eggs and decorate some eggs with your own drawings.

Print the pdf or draw your own eggs

Print the eggs from our Etsy shop on white cardstock, or pastel cardstock in colors of your choice. We used white Astrobrights cardtock.

Color the eggs

Color your eggs with colored-pencils, or crayons, or markers. We think the Botanical Garden colored-pencil set from Prismacolor has a perfect palette for this Easter garland.

Cut out the eggs

You can cut slightly outside the black line if you want to have the outline in your garland (our pictures show this option). If you do not want the egg outline, simply cut slightly inside the egg outline line.

Punch 2 holes at the top of each egg

Punch two holes next to each other at the top of each egg. We used a standard 1/4″ hole punch. It is important to punch two holes so that the eggs will face forward when strung on the ribbon or yarn.

String the eggs onto ribbon or yarn

To determine the length of ribbon or yarn, decide on the length you would like the garland to be and add some extra (keep in mind it is easier to cut off extra than to have to restring a garland that is not long enough). If you are using all the decorated eggs (a total of 18 eggs), the garland nicely spans a fireplace mantel. If you used a standard ¼” hole punch, we recommend ¼” wide ribbon, or chunky yarn. This size fits nicely in the holes and allows the eggs to stay in place with the spacing of your choosing along the ribbon or yarn.

Decorate your home

Hang the garland in a place in your home to add some extra Easter joy and reminders of God’s love!

HAPPY EASTER!

If you are looking for some Easter basket treat ideas, scroll down for some books we love that might also make nice Easter gifts…

Do you want to do your own hand-lettering? We love practicing hand-lettering with this beautiful book: Pretty Simple Lettering by Whitney Farnsworth. It is such a joy, and brings so much calmness to the day to spend some time with this book.

If you are still looking for Easter basket treats, we wanted to share with you some of our favorite Easter-themed books…

Jan Brett’s The Easter Egg is full of beautiful illustrations, and the story has a sweet message that everyone has unique talents. Wonderful for your budding artists!

Our children love Rechenka’s Eggs by Patricia Polacco. Lovely Easter egg art, and a beautiful message of friendship and the importance of caring for others.

Margaret Wise Brown’s The Golden Egg Book is just so fun! Little children love reading this over and over again.

We love Maite Roche’s books with such sweet illustrations! The Beautiful Story of the Bible is of course for any time of year, including Easter.