Are you a lover of books looking for a creative way to celebrate advent while also inspiring a love of reading? If so, you are in the right place! Featured today on Theresa’s Reviews, you can learn how to make a book advent calendar. Open one book and read it every day through December 24th as a festive celebration of the countdown to Christmas!

Buy or borrow 24 books

You will need 24 books to create a book advent calendar. One is for each day of the month in December before Christmas. Although you could buy them, you can also do this for free with books borrowed from the library. Just make sure you check the books out for a long enough time and return them before their due date.

If your family is celebrating together with the book advent calendar, you may want to buy some books for each person. You could also choose books you would enjoy reading together and keeping in a family library.

Gift wrap them

Use festive holiday-themed wrapping paper to gift wrap all 24 books. You will put them all out as a display to help create excitement for the countdown to Christmas Day.

Stack them as a tree

To create an advent calendar with the wrapped books, stack them from biggest to smallest to look like a tree. Place ornaments or a snow globe on top, just as you would put a star on top of a Christmas tree.

You could also create a book advent calendar by putting the books in boxes and stacking the boxes on top of each other for a larger display.

Photo credit: Cockburn Libraries

Open one book each day

Every day starting on December 1st, open and read one book. This is a wonderful tradition to share with children, but if you love reading like I do, it would be quite exciting to have your own adult book advent calendar too!

Theresa’s Reviews 2019 Christmas Gift Guide for Readers

If you are shopping for children’s books for your advent book calendar, check out these 14 books selected for Theresa’s Reviews 2019 Gift Guide for Readers. They are arranged from books for younger children to older children.

Spin the wheel for a festive learning adventure! Busy Christmas is an entertaining way to learn basic concepts and celebrate the holidays! It includes a sturdy spinning wheel mechanism for toddlers to play as they learn. With colorful illustrations and an interactive format, it is a perfect way to keep toddlers engaged. Preschoolers are not only introduced to basic concepts they will also develop fine motor skills and remain active.

With a red stocking hat and scarf Arthur’s Holiday Adventure is ready to help you celebrate the season! This board book shaped like a sweet reindeer will send your child on a learning adventure. The whimsical illustrations and short story will keep active young imaginations engaged while learning simple facts about the little character’s surroundings and habitats. The sturdy format are perfect for tiny hands to grasp. Each book in the Animal Adventures series is die-cut to be shaped like adorable interesting and recognizable animals. Collect them all!

Max the Rabbit Builds a Snowman brings Max the Rabbit back just in time for the holidays. Help Max build a snowman with the newest book in the charming series featuring simple jigsaw puzzles. This interactive format includes a large puzzle piece on every spread. Collect all the pieces throughout the story and put them together on the last page to reveal a surprise ending! The sturdy, high-quality board, rounded corners, and safe puzzle pieces perfectly-sized for tiny hands. It’s sure to be a hit with your youngest readers. Little readers will sharpen fine motor skills through playful learning. Max is a great way to add cheer to any child’s holiday.

Happy Holidays, Pirates: Lift-the-flap Book is an absolute stunner of a book featuring a crew of unexpectedly endearing pirate characters sure to entertain children and parents alike! Bountiful surprises, a rollicking and joyous story, and a pirates trove of hidden treasures under each flap make for a truly memorable holiday experience. A popular pirate theme coupled with the interactive lift-the-flap format makes the book a special treasure for young readers who love to play as they read. The entertaining format helps children develop hand-eye coordination, curiosity and emotional intellect. The large size, delightfully detailed illustrations and witty poems make this book an ideal holiday present. Sturdy thick board pages with rounded corners will make this treasure last forever.

Little Heroes: Amazing Animals Who Changed the World share the contributions of nine animals who went down in history as interspecies heroes, such as Blossom the vaccine cow, Stubby the war dog, Cher Ami the carrier pigeon, Winnie the friendly bear, Simon the seacat, Togo the sled dog, Able and Baker the space monkeys and Koko the signing gorilla.

In their hip and often humorous Instagram accounts, Amanda and Cree Jones invite the world into their life with two young kids. Now, the Joneses are sharing another experience, the struggle to keep their kids from putting everything they see into their mouths. Using simple, bright illustrations, irresistible colors, gentle repetition, and a lighthearted tone, this stylish board book Yum Yummy Yuck teaches babies and toddlers what they should and shouldn’t put in their mouths.

Delectable treats like an ice cream cone, a pear, and a donut are interspersed with not-so-yummy things kids find irresistible like coins, boogers, and sand. Facing pages display the correct use of these items, like how boogers go in tissues, coins in a piggy bank, and sand in a bucket. Designed to appeal to modern parents, this durable and attractive book will have kids and their parents going back to it and sharing in the fun of all the delicious and disgusting things kids like.

Loaded with hundreds of attention-grabbing illustrations, this adorable Holiday Look & Find book provides hours of fun for curious toddlers and their entire families. With almost 800 holiday pictures to search, this stunningly illustrated book combines the classic Look & Find game with a large number of questions and challenges on each page making it not only entertaining but educational as well. Children will also develop attention skills while looking at the bright colorful pictures. The large format with adorable illustrations make The Holiday Season a wonderful Christmas gift!

Ring in the winter season with hours of sticker fun in Holiday Celebration Sticker Book: 1000 Clever Stickers! Perfect for decorating, little gift givers will delight in adding personalized touches to holiday cards and gifts. This 64-page book includes over 1000 stickers featuring exciting wintry images, such as snowy scenes, bright stars, scrumptious baked cookies, and adorable animals. Giant sticker book includes everything your family needs to celebrate the holiday season. Little learners will love to decorate, play, and celebrate!

Warm & Busy Wintertime: Clever Activity Pad is a lightweight tear-off pad ideal for travel! The handy travel size format allows you to easily take it with you. It’s filled with stimulating and engaging activities; mazes, puzzles, games, doodles, and many more. It’s the perfect way to brighten winter days inside.

Warm & Busy Holidays: Clever Activity Pad is another lightweight activity pad is ideal for holiday travel. It’s the perfect way to keep entertained during the holidays!

Filled with merry-making activities, the colorful pages of Merry Mazes the Holidays invite young readers to solve holiday-themed maze challenges. Each activity features a fresh new scene and different things to discover. The mazes vary in difficulty levels so they challenge and entertain every reader. Children will sharpen their logical thinking skills as they explore the North Pole a Christmas tree lot and many more wintry surprises!

The sci-fi inspired taxi trip in Taxi Ride with Victor will have kids roaring with laughter. Victor is everyone’s favorite extraterrestrial taxi driver, but he has a big problem. His memory is terrible! He can never remember his way around the galaxy. When he drops off his passengers at the wrong locations, there are some unexpected and hilarious high jinks.

Elsa Klever’s wonderful drawings incorporate every day experiences–like going to the dentist, the library, or the post office–into otherworldly scenes with friendly aliens, talking clouds, grumpy ghosts, and an enormous octopus. The book offers gentle lessons about friendship and opportunity, and children will want to join Victor again and again on his funny, mixed-up, and carefree rides. A brave young girl, a whimsical house, and a ticklish dragon help young readers see the world through Gaudí’s eyes in A Dragon on the Roof. Set in Casa Batlló, one of Antoni Gaudí’s most renowned buildings, this joyful story introduces young readers to the architect’s work, inciting their curiosity and imagination along the way.

While her nanny is sleeping, young Paloma hears a noise. She climbs the stairs of her house until she reaches the roof, where a dragon is perched. Unafraid, Paloma reaches out to pet the dragon, but he is ticklish, and as he laughs, he spews a myriad of sea animals that he had unwittingly swallowed. The house is transformed into a dreamy aquarium and the dragon settles into a deep sleep on the roof. Cécile Alix’s playful story and Fred Sochard’s boldly graphic illustrations are the perfect accompaniment to Gaudí’s exuberant vision.

As readers make their way through Paloma’s home, they are introduced to its fabulous elements, such as columns shaped like elephant legs, marine-inspired tiles, glass, and ironwork, and of course the spectacularly undulating, iridescent roof, which resembles a sleeping dragon. The end of the book includes a brief history of Gaudí’s career and provides helpful background to Paloma’s story. Kids will want to linger over the pictures and imagine what their own house would be like if a dragon were living on their roof. This delightfully illustrated children’s cookbook What’s Cooking at 10 Garden Street offers a global menu of dishes to share with friends, family, and neighbors.

Something delicious is cooking in the old apartment building on Garden Street! Pilar is mixing gazpacho, Monsieur Ping is stir-frying broccoli, Señora Flores is preparing a pot of beans, and Josef and Rafik are rolling meatballs. Other neighbors are making mini-quiches, baba ganoush, dhal, and peanut butter cookies. When they’re all finished cooking everyone gathers in the garden to enjoy a delicious meal and each other’s company.

Each inviting spread in this storybook offers a recipe from a different culinary tradition. Dishes that kids love, like guacamole, spaghetti, and banana bread are interspersed with others that include less familiar ingredients, such as mirin, tahini, and turmeric. The recipes explain how each dish is made and come with fun and detailed illustrations. Combining simple, fresh flavors with recipes from around the world, this book will nourish and inspire budding cooks while whetting the appetites of their more experienced helpers.

Dream Journal is what dreams are made of, literally! Professor of Psychiatry Dr.Allan Peterkin helps readers uncover the power of their dreams and better understand the science of sleep. With lively text, vibrant imagery, and plenty of space for writing, it’s the perfect tool to help kids remember, record, and reflect on their nighttime adventures. Catching Z’s has never been so much fun!

Noah’s Ark, Moses, David and Goliath, the ten plagues, Daniel and the lions’ den, Jonah and the giant fish, and many more of the Bible’s most powerful stories, 27 in all, are compellingly retold in the beautifully illustrated Treasury of Bible Stories. Readers will be fascinated by the ancient people and events they encounter, surprised by some of the lesser known accounts revealed, and inspired by the lessons these tales impart. Stories cover important ground beyond religion, such as culture, history, and geography, and they touch on issues that remain relevant today–faith, loyalty, kindness, violence, generosity, greed, jealousy, and more. These accessible, readable stories give kids a rich picture of biblical times, which encourages them to think about our role in the world and to learn more.From upscale splurges to flashy fun in nature, The Book of Bling: Ritzy Rocks, Extravagant Animals, Sparkling Science and More is a treasure trove filled with wonders that will dazzle and delight. Read about how nature struts its stuff with tantalizing tidbits about animals, including a few that literally glitter with irridesence to confuse predators.

Maybe you’ll strike it rich after reading about Crater of Diamonds State Park in Arkansas, U.S.A., where anyone can go hunt for sparkling gems. Dig into info about the world’s mysterious minerals, gorgeous geodes, and ritzy rocks.

Discover extravagant expenditures like Canada’s million-dollar solid gold coin. Learn all about the splendid science of diamonds that rain from the sky in space. Get the secret behind glowing bioluminescence. And go back in time to uncover palatial palaces, the riches of royalty, and other ancient treasures. To show off the lush content in proper fashion, readers will be dazzled by hundreds of fun flashy photos throughout.Nerd A to Z: Your Reference to Literally Figuratively Everything You’ve Always Wanted to Know is a superstuffed alphabetical compendium of must-know facts from science, pop culture, history, and more is perfect for kids who already know the names of every single dinosaur or want to understand exactly how the Millennium Falcon works. It’s a book for grammar gurus, science snobs, music geeks, and history buffs. In short, it’s a book for nerds. Inside, you’ll find browsable, info-packed blurbs that’ll give you the lowdown on everything from augmented reality to zydeco, with larger features that dive deep into fascinating topics like UFOs, pirates, artificial intelligence, and daring circus acts. And you’ll hear from the world’s most notable (and quotable) Nerds of Note from history and today.Brain Candy: Seriously Sweet Facts to Satisfy Your Curiosity is like a sweet treat that will satisfy any reader’s fun fact cravings. Cranium “cavities” will be filled to the brim with 500 fascinating knowledge nuggets about numbers, fun facts, and cool trivia on all kinds of topics. With features that dive into why potatoes and tomatoes are a dynamic duo, amazing animal tongues and how they are used to ”lick” their competition and dental care through the ages, Brain Candy is a tasty approach to feeding kids tantalizing tidbits about the world.