Stations of the Cross Candles

This is a project I have intended to do for the past several years. This year I finally got around to actually buying the materials. I think I just couldn't resist the $1 bottles of lodge podge at Target and needed a reason to justify buying some.

This would be wonderful project to do with your kids and then use every week as your family says stations together. Of course, I did the project myself and we have been attending stations as a family at a local parish. The Knights there love having our boys on hand to carry the cross because other than our family, it has almost always been elderly folks. But the kids have enjoyed looking at the candles anyway.

You can find I instructions and printable for your own candles all over the place. I got my printables .here.

Keeping the Little Ones Busy

Small hands and long presentations do not always go well together. But as much as possible we believe it is important for the entire family to attend award functions for each other. Which means packing coloring books, lacing cards, matching games, and other such games.  The latest in young child entertainment around our house are mini mosaics.

These art kits are fairly inexpensive and can keep a kid in their seat for 15 to 30 minutes depending on the age of the kid and the complexity of the project. And bought us a decent amount of seat time earlier this week.

The House the Kids Built

Here is the house built by the older kids. They said they tried to make it look just like the one on the box.

Seven Sorrows of Mary Craft

September 15 was the feast day of Our Lady of Sorrows.  I found a rather neat art project a few weeks ahead of time at Catholic Icing.  Even though I printed it out well ahead of time, it still ended up being put together late because that seems to be how we run around here. It turned out fairly well until one of my children decided to jump up to try to smack it while walking through the hall like his brother had just done and managed to rip it down.  Sigh.  At least I tried, right?

Art Class

Today was the final art show for the class the kids were taking at one of our local colleges.  I had 5 kids enrolled this year, everyone from kindergarten to eighth grade.  These classes are very affordable way to provide the kids a chance to work with higher quality art materials and ideas. The classes are taught by art education majors working on getting classroom experience. This means all we have to pay for is materials and the rates top off at 3 kids, any others are free.

Because most schools are cutting their art classes and art departments, the teachers are being taught how to incorporate art as a part of other disciplines. The projects usually focus on cultural awareness in some way or computer graphics.

I did not manage to get pictures of each kid with their individual projects but I did take pictures of most of the projects.  Sean carved an Enterprise which most folks at the art show loved.  Kieran worked on computer images.  Katie and Liam did sculpting projects.  Abby's projects focused on animals this year.  There are 3 sessions during the class and each session focuses on making one single large project so everyone brings home 3 completed items.

The Marian projects were made by Gabe today at his preschool class.  He'll join the bigger kids next year but this year he just had preschool once a month.  He seems to have loved it.

Little Flowers

We had another Little Flowers meeting today.  Fifteen girls joined us today.  It seems we either have a large group or a small one.  I don't mind a smaller group except when I have already prepared craft supplies for the larger group.  Small issues, I know.

This month we focused on the Blessed Mother and the virtue of cheerfulness.  I am just going to come right out and say that it is darn near impossible to find a craft for cheerfulness.  Seriously.  Many thanks to the folks at Crafolic, Shower of Roses, and Waltzing Matilda for the wonderful ideas they came up with that I was able to use for our meeting.  Have I mentioned that I am not terribly creative? 

The girls all had a great time and we spent a little time before the Blessed Sacrament praying for a special Mom that I know who is missing her little girl. 

Morning Offering Craft

I am attempting to get back to doing more hands-on fun stuff with the kids.  The stuff that requires you to buy lots of glue sticks, scissors, paper and the like.  The stuff the kids actually enjoy doing.  Even if it does make a mess that at times they seem to not see when it is time to clean up.

Today we made a Morning Offering craft.  I have always loved the idea of a morning offering prayer and yet I have always forgotten to teach one to my kids (or use one myself, oops).  While browsing the Crafolic website, I stumbled up the craft they already had put together.

I'm hoping to run these projects through our laminator later tonight or tomorrow. Then we can hang one up in each bedroom and one in the kitchen so we will all be reminded to say a morning offering each day.

Divine Mercy Crafts

We are attempting to do the entire Divine Mercy Novena leading up to Divine Mercy Sunday.  I say attempting to because we seem to rather stink at follow through on things of this nature lately.   But we are trying again.

As we are starting the novena, we have made a few crafts to help the younger children understand a little better.  Sean made this Divine Mercy Craft yesterday.  He even managed to find blue and red glitter to put on it.  Catholic Icing also has a wonderful Divine Mercy countdown craft you can make using the original craft as the counter.  But my glue gun is missing so we won't be doing that this year. 

Today several of the middle children made this Divine Mercy Lacing project.  This project is great for giving them their own one decade counter for saying the chaplet, complete with the prayers written on each bead.

Well also spend some time reading this book and listening to the Glory Stories audio on St. Faustina's life.  Hopefully this will help the children learn the story behind the Divine Mercy.  We've also found a few coloring sheets to use as well and I plan to see if EWTN will be running any Diving Mercy shows for the kids this week. 

Last Supper Project

On Tuesday I printed out everything we needed to make this project for Holy Thursday.  Then we got busy (I realized I probably should not go shopping on Good Friday and really needed to get the groceries on Thursday instead), Alan came home early, and I fell asleep.  It was a much needed nap but it meant our Holy Thursday project was not finished until Good Friday.  Oops. 

a homemade last supper

Katie, Abby, Liam, and Kieran helped with this project.  It was a bit harder to get the egg cartons to stay together than I thought it would be and I imagine the entire thing would have gone together better with a glue gun rather than glue sticks.  But my glue gun is missing.  Guess I need to do something about that.

I love the finished project even if Katie did repeatedly cut off noses, beards, fingers, and in one case half of a face.  Now to find something for Good Friday.

Playing With Color

Today I had several of the kids paint a primary color wheel.  Something I just stumbled upon but thought would be perfect for a bit of art.  This involved digging out the water colors and realizing that they all got put away without pain tbrushes.  No paint brushes in the art bins in the living room or in the paint bin in the school room. So I go upstairs to pull out the paint brushes from the painting project I did with Little Flowers only to discover that most of them were never washed and are now covered in 2 week old acrylic paint.   So now comes the internal debate of do I attempt to save the brushes or just toss the lot of them since I bought 99 cent bags of assorted brushes and call it a day.

Anyway, I had a few kids who did the project properly and ended up with a very nice band of secondary colors in their color wheel. Then I have one who decided to paint to his own drummer and paint the middle spots himself.  The wrong colors.  Sigh. At least he used the secondary colors.