How to Explore the World with an Easy DIY Kids Advent Calendar

Advent is here and there is A LOT of festive excitement in our house. We are yet to put the tree up so goodness knows how M (almost four) and N (18 months) will contain themselves once it is here! My mum bought us a beautiful kids advent calendar a few weeks ago, and I had been pondering what to put in it. Advent is all about celebration and the lead up to a big greeting. This gave me the idea to create a fun advent calendar where the word ‘hello’ or ‘hi’, in a different language, greets you every day.

For the first nine days, I created nine different speech bubbles saying ‘hello’ or ‘hi’ in the languages we currently have available here at Lil’ollo. These are Spanish, Italian, French, German, Welsh, Mandarin Chinese, Dutch, Polish and English.

I put one speech bubble in the relevant door along with some little treats. The children love opening the doors to find out what is inside. M is really on board with the ‘hello’ part but N is a little bit young. However she still enjoys going to the computer and finding out how the word sounds when I’m unsure. Of course, everyone enjoys the chocolate!

At the end of last week, after those first nine days of advent, I posted a photo with the languages we began with. We had some brilliant suggestions over social media and so I have created the speech bubbles for days 10-18 of advent. Our new languages include Guaraní, Basque, Portuguese, Greek, Luxembourgish,

Romanian, Vietnamese, Irish and Tahitian.

However, we still need six more!

Can you help us? How do you say hello in your language(s)? Do you have a great DIY kids advent calendar idea to share? Please leave a comment below, we would love to hear from you.

Happy Advent!

Alex and Team Lil’ollo x

Alex is a designer, writer, entrepreneur, problem solver and mother to two multilingual children. She is passionate about using design to improve people’s lives and has worked on projects around the world. Alex is a champion for languages and creative arts in early education and the creator of Lil’ollo.