The Journey to Christmas: An Advent Devotional for Young Children

To do this, most churches associate each week in Advent with a particular theme. This children's devotional focuses on the themes:

Hope - Prepare - Rejoice - Peace

These reflect the Advent journey of hoping for a Messiah, to preparing to receive him, to rejoicing at his coming, to celebrating the peace he brings. Your goal is to help your young child gain a sense of what each word means.

Each week is broken into seven days of devotions, where each devotion is a simple sentence that connects the week's word with an experience a young child can relate to. There is also a simple explanation for older children about how that sentence connects with Jesus, based on Scripture.

Read the day's sentence with your child and ask them questions about the picture - what they see, how it makes them feel, etc. Then for older children, read or restate in your own words the scriptural explanation. Answer any questions they might have. Finally, read the day's sentence once again.

The point of the devotional for this age group is to help introduce vocabulary so that your child can start recognizing words (e.g. Hope) and names (e.g. Jesus) in order to form the foundation for faith.