Ideas for Making Lent Meaningful

Lent has officially begun!  I thought I’d share some links for you to check out… these are what we did for Lent last year, and what we plan to do again this year.   You can see our crafts/artwork:
our Lenten Basket:
and our Lenten Countdown Cross:  

I hope these inspire you to create some Lenten traditions in your own homes!

I mentioned in those posts, rather presumptuously, that I was planning on making a second set of the Countdown Cross to give away; and that I planned to offer everything as a printable this Lent.  It seemed like I had so much time to get all this done!  Silly girl.  With two computer crashes to deal with in the past year all of my saved items for the printables were lost, and while I did plan to re-do everything in time for this year’s Lent… well, I ended up pregnant and in some sort of pregnancy-fog, and that’s my excuse these days for every single failing I might be accused of.  An excuse I’m sticking to until I can claim the new baby as one. After that gets old I’m sure I’ll come up with something else.  ;)

Of course there is still the new Lent / Easter e-book!  Go check it out if you haven’t yet!

This post is linked to the Celebrating Lent Link-Up Party at Explore and Express and Wonderful in an Easter Kind of Way, as well as:

Have a beautiful Day! :)
Nicole

Craft Time – Ascension of the Lord

Today is the 40th day of Easter (which is a 50 day season), and marks the end of the 40 days that Jesus spent on Earth after His resurrection.  This is the day He ascended into heaven! 
This morning M and I read the Bible story about the ascension and then did a quick craft to make it more memorable.  The craft was inspired by this post at Catholic Icing – I just changed it up a little bit.

Supplies:

 Look at the supplies, not the messy art table!

Paper or styrofoam cup, yarn, needle, hole punch, markers, cotton balls, glue, cardstock sun shape, and a small picture of Jesus.  You could use a magazine cutting of Jesus glued to cardstock or find a picture online.  We shrunk a coloring book picture on our scanner and printed it out on cardstock.  You want your Jesus picture to be small enough to “hide” inside the cup.
Steps:
1. Color your cup blue, and color your sun and picture of Jesus.
2. Glue cotton balls around the top and bottom of your cup. 
3. Punch a hole at the top and bottom of your sun, and a hole above Jesus’ head (we glued on an extra strip of cardstock to the back of Jesus so there was room for a hole above his head).
4. Thread your yarn through the holes in the sun, down through the bottom of the cup (we used an embroidery needle to thread the yarn through the cup), and through the hole above Jesus’ head.   
5. Tie a loop above the sun, large enough to hand on a door knob, if you wish.
6. Tie a knot where the yarn goes through the cup, so it rests on the outside of the cup.
7. Tie a knot through the hole above Jesus.
There you go!  You can pull the sun to make Jesus “rise” into the sky and be hidden behind the clouds:
 
Cute, simple, and fun to play with! :)

Have a beautiful day! :)

Learning by Heart – May 13, 2011

“The mother’s heart is the child’s schoolroom”
– Henry Ward Beecher

  Mother’s Day 2011
This was taken at the end of the day – I look worn out and
M looks ready to go. :)  That is usually how it is around here! 
I normally wouldn’t post a picture of myself with glasses on (I so dislike how I look in them), but I have to be in SOME pictures on here!  It’s my blog! :)

~M is 4.5 years old~

Literacy

M continues to love poems and these sequencing cards are a great activity.  He can do these all on his own, as long as I separate them into groups for him (one paperclip of cards for each poem): 

His homemade puppet theater (a tension rod in a doorway with a blanket thrown over the top) has been seeing more action lately, and we made these great little stick puppets for The Three Bears.  This is a fun way of doing more story sequencing and mom and dad get a cute little show to watch. ;) 

And M wants to learn to read.  You can read more about that in this post.

 

Science – Dinosaurs!

M loves the little dinosaur fossil eggs you chisel apart in order to find the bones.  He’s done many, many of these over the winter and early spring.  You can find them at Michael’s as well as Dollar Tree. See the little hammer lying on the table?  That quickly got set aside, and M began using his “real”, big hammer.  This kid is all about action, not patience.

     This particular one is an Ankylosaurus.  For each dino he’s unearthed and put together, we’ve looked for a book to learn a bit more about it.  I can’t remember the names of the books, but there are a ton of dino books out there (on the odd chance you haven’t noticed)!

 

Fine Motor Skills, Practical Life, and Misc.

After seeing this post over at My Montessori Journey, I thought it would be fun to set something similar out for M.  I found simple step-by-step tutorials for drawing a bird and a dog (look towards the bottom of the web page for the dog), and made instruction cards for M.  He wasn’t as eager to do this as I imagined he would be, and that was fine.  I don’t want to inhibit his own imaginative drawings by making him think things have to be drawn in a certain way.  However, I did enjoy seeing how he was able to go from step to step in order.  Here are the cards (I had each set on a ring):
And here are M’s finished drawings: Are these not absolutely adorable?!  :)  He said, “look at my chicken!” – I think he surprised himself, haha.  I have to say I like his chicken better than the bird he was trying to draw. :)

 

M loves to watch me use my sewing machine.  It is an event, let me tell you.  He anticipates it, watches every move, tries to figure out exactly how it works, and begs for more when I’m finished.  Sometimes I think he’s going to break into applause.  Part of it is his inclination towards all things mechanical, but part of it is just a love of the idea that something new can be created.  So I set out a simple embroidery hoop, some muslin, and a little yarn for him.  He wanted to sew a picture, so we started with a smiley face.  He learned to backstitch in order to create a line of stitches (although not perfectly, as you can see!), and overall really enjoyed this.

 

 

May Day meant a little flower crown for the statue of Mary in our garden.  I used some leftover flowers from a lei, cut a crown shape out, and let M staple the flowers on.  He LOVES the stapler (totally supervised, don’t worry!). 

 Ok, I guess the garden needs a little work.

It’s a little big.

We read two beautifully written and illustrated books about Mary:

 

 

Art

Here’s a look at M’s Art Box for spring (which has recently changed into an Art Cart – more on that later).  It was full of things to make flowers and butterflies: 

Here’s a bit of his artwork: 

 
And, my favorite, a ribbon and flower collage on contact paper for Mother’s Day. :) 

I’m linking this post up to Preschool Corner and Weekly Wrap-Up; be sure to check them out!

Have a beautiful day! :)

 

 

How Lent Went

:)  1. Artwork

Ah, it feels good to be back blogging. :) 

Before I forget everything we did while observing Lent this year, I want to write a few posts about it.  So today and the next couple of days may not bear much relevant reading, but it will give me something to link back to next Lent, heh.  ;)

First, I’m going to share the Lent-specific arts and crafts we worked on.  We have a door that goes from our kitchen into our breezeway and is made up of glass panes.  I want to call it a French door, but I’m not sure that’s correct.  Anyway, you get the idea.

It is perfect for filling up with sun catcher-type artwork, which, as you know, is really overdone around here.  Although, as I sit here and look at my kitchen walls which are covered with the creations of a 4 year old, I’m realizing maybe we just overdo art, period.  Or maybe Mama has a problem with throwing some art away from time to time.

Or maybe we are just happy and don’t want to change a thing. :)  It won’t always be like this, right?!

Anyway, back to my kitchen door.  To celebrate Lent and a few special days within Lent we decided to create 7 pieces of art and arrange them on the glass panes of the door in the shape of a cross.

And, for fun, we experimented with a few new (for us) artsy ideas in the process. 

I started by cutting black frames for each section of the door, then brought one out on each special day, along with whatever other supplies were needed.  We looked through the calendar and chose 7 special days to create something for our door.

First, on Ash Wednesday (the first day of Lent), M made a purple cross pane.  The cross was made from construction paper, and sandwiched between two pieces of wax paper.  To make it pretty M sharpened some old crayons then used the shavings to decorate the empty areas, and I ironed it a bit to get them to melt:

  
This was our first attempt at this, and I like how it turned out, although I could have used a bit cooler iron, I think.

Next up was St. Patrick’s Day, March 17th.  We melted crayons and painted with them, which was a huge amount of fun!  The texture of the finished artwork is fabulous.  We made a shamrock with a rainbow stem, and talked about how St. Patrick used the shamrock to explain the Trinity.  We used some sketch pad paper for this one.  It is heavy enough to hold the melted crayon and still let the light through a bit.  I’ll be writing more about this fun activity in an upcoming post.       

M had so much fun painting this way that we decided to make a heart also, for the top section of our cross.  After painting it, I cut it out and taped it to a piece of wax paper:

And our window cross began to take shape:

 

For St. Joseph’s feast day (March 19th), and The Annunciation of the Lord (the angel Gabriel’s visit to Mary, celebrated on March 25th, 9 months before Christmas), we used small cut-out pictures from online or magazines, contact paper, and tissue paper…

St. Joseph:

I love how this simple activity looks so pretty and a lot like stained glass: 

For the Annunciation, we added in some pieces of aluminum foil around the picture of Mary and the angel, for a bit of bling:

 

The finished pieces made the horizontal cross piece:

For Palm Sunday I knew we should use a palm leaf in some way, but I wasn’t quite sure what to do.  M cut one of our palms into sections and we arranged it on a piece of contact paper.  M wasn’t interested in using tissue paper again, so I dug through my ribbon collection and found some beautiful sheer ribbon that looks gold on one side and red on the other.  We snipped it into pieces and placed them on the empty areas of the contact paper: 
Doesn’t it look nice?  However, once it was hanging in the window, the fact that it is very sheer ribbon meant that you could barely see the colors of it.  We took it down and lined the back with white tissue paper, which helped a bit; but, as you can see in the picture below, this one didn’t turn out as vivid as the other panes:I like the idea of using ribbon in this way, but next time we’ll find something a bit more solid or use a darker color behind it.

 

Last, but not least, was Holy Thursday.  We used a picture of the Last Supper printed from online, and some wax paper.  You could use parchment paper for this too, but I really thought the wax paper gave more of a pretty glow in the window. 

I intended to use our oil pastels, but could not find them – ack!  I love those things, so I hope they turn up soon.  We ended up using some Elmer “Slicks” which are very much like oil pastels.  They are a creamy sort of crayon, but a bit messier than pastels.  Window crayons would work too.  I used a gold paint pen to draw random lines on the wax paper, and M (who, I must say, learned to color within lines overnight it seems) used the Slicks to color each section:

Then we taped our picture of the Last Supper in the middle, framed it and hung it on the last pane of our cross:(I think this was my favorite of them all!)

 

Our window cross was finished just in time for Good Friday:

To finish up our Lenten artwork, we made a super easy Easter (or Paschal) candle.

This idea was straight from Catholic Icing’s Paschal Candle post.

Simply scratch your design into the candle with a toothpick, paint over it, then rub off the excess with a wet paper towel.  We didn’t have cloves, but M did want to add some star “jewels”.  We kept the design very simple – a cross with the year, and a shining sun on the back.  

We’ll leave our window cross and our Easter candle up for the entire season of Easter (it’s a 50-day feast!).  Our “door cross” is beautiful, and a really lovely reminder to take time to reflect on our faith; while our candle reminds us of the wonderful Light we have been given.

Have a beautiful day! :)