Who is Coming to Our House? {Nativity Sensory Bin}

We are excited to share our Nativity Sensory Bin, a Christmas book based activity!  My children loved digging into this sensory bin while I read the Christmas story from one of our favorite books!!

I grew up with about thirty different nativities around my house.  My mom was a collector.  But we all loved it!!  We all took turns hiding the baby Jesus’ and putting them back on Christmas morning.  Our family doesn’t have that many nativity scenes, but we do have a few that we love playing with and exploring through the Christmas season.

Who is coming to our house?

I decided to introduce our Christmas Nativity this year with a very special book that both my children have grown to love.  Who’s Coming to Our House? by Joseph Slate and Ashley Wolff is a sweet book about all the animals in the Bethlehem stable who are waiting for a very special guest to arrive.  The little mouse in the book seems to know before everyone else who is coming.  It is a fun little board book that can get your child thinking about the true meaning of Christmas, a precious baby, born of a virgin, God among us.

We started our time by making a simple mouse craft.  The mouse is the central character of the book, as the page illustrates above :)

Creating our Paper Mice

Each of the children were given the supplies to glue their little mice together on their own tray.  They both enjoyed the time and love their little mice even more :)

All you need to make a mouse craft is:

• glue
• a folded brown piece of paper, cut in the shape of a mouse
• two little brown ears
• googly eyes
• small pink pom
• black piece of yarn

Making our Nativity Sensory Bin

After the mice dried, I set out to put our Nativity Sensory Bin together.  I decided to put in our Lego table that we hardly use.  I haven’t wanted to throw it out, because I know these can be expensive and it was gifted to us.  So, a sensory table is the perfect solution!!  Why haven’t I been doing this all along?!  Anyways, I used cracked corn (found in the pet store section of Target) for our base, set our big stable in it, along with various animals we have around the house.  I couldn’t find every animal mentioned in the book, but we found most.  We added our little paper mouse to the bin as well.

After the kids played for a bit, I began reading the book.

In the last pages, Mary and Joseph visit, so I brought them out as I was reading.  My two year old was particularly very, very excited :)

John liked playing with the spider (and added a dragonfly in, his favorite.)

What are your favorite Christmas books for young children?

This post is a part of the wonderful series, Story Book Advent, from Rainy Day Mum.  24 Days of Christmas Book Based Activities!!  From December 1st to the 24th, we will bring you 24 different activities to at least 24 different Christmas books!  I hope you follow along for a wonderful series!!