End of Year Toddler Craft - Calendar Cut up Artwork

Today my almost 2 and a half year old son, Eli, and I sat down for craft time with our old 2013 calendar, two pair of scissors, and a glue stick.  This would probably work with any calendar, but we had a calendar with Bible verses for each month and in our Christian house this was a good activity to teach my son more about the season we will soon be celebrating – Christmas.
First, I let him flip through the calendar and we picked his two favorite pictures: a light house on a ice covered cape, and a wheat field reminiscent of Kansas.  I cut those two images out as our backgrounds.  Then, while he practiced cutting on a page that would become scrap paper, I began cutting the Bible verses from each month and reading the verses aloud to Eli.Once all the verses were cut, I would hold the verse, he would hold the open glue stick, and I would help him glue the back of the verse, ask him where he wanted it to go, he would point to a spot on one of the backgrounds, I’d place it there, and he’d pat it down.  After each verse was glued in place, I’d read it.  Then we’d repeat.  He really enjoyed the making the project and using the glue sticks.  If he were older, he probably could have done all the cutting himself, but as it was it was fun and not frustrating for my son’s budding skills and gave us a chance to talk about Jesus preparing for the upcoming holiday season.Once we had our two backgrounds near complete, we had dad take pictures so Eli would feel special and appreciated in his artistic efforts, then we picked a place on his craft wall, and hung the pictures together.  To top off the craft session, I grabbed a puppet who commenced to ask Eli questions about his craft and let Eli ‘show off’ his artwork to ‘someone’ besides me.  Overall a pretty easy craft for a parent and young child that had good results, made use of an old calendar, and in this case helped our family focus a little more on the meaning of the season with Christmas – Jesus Christ.