This countdown chain has been the biggest lifesaver! As a parent, you know that one of the worst mistakes you can make is telling your kids about something fun too far in advance. Once they get excited, they start nagging you constantly about when it’s going to happen. And since they have no concept of time, they don’t fully understand how long it actually takes for said date to arrive.

I was trying to hold off on talking about Halloween until the last second, but decorations and advertisements everywhere have made that impossible. So the week before last we made a countdown chain together so that the girls would have a visual of when October 31st would be here. They can still be excited about the special day coming up, but they have a more concrete understanding of how much longer it’ll actually take.

To make our countdown chain, we used construction paper, scissors, crayons, and tape or a stapler. You can obviously adapt this for any occasion, but we chose purple, orange, and green paper for Halloween. I think that it would be really fun to use red and green for Christmas or your little one’s favorite colors for their birthday.

Goose helped me cut the strips of paper (awesome fine motor practice), they both colored them a bit with crayons, and then they helped me connect them in a pattern. Each morning we remove one of the links and then count how many days are left until trick-or-treating.

If you want to take it a step further, you can write numbers on the links or put a sign at the top stating what the countdown is for. Lots of fun ways to mix it up, but hopefully it’ll save you the headache of constantly repeating how many days are left until a special occasion.

For more easy craft ideas for little ones, try tear art and cotton ball painting!

Talk to you soon!