Crafting With The Saints
Last year my daughter completed 1st grade. Since our oldest was in second grade when we started homeschooling, we had not yet used the first-grade curriculum with Seton Home Study. We quickly fell in love with the art book. The first-grade Art book, ART 1 For Young Catholics, is a book of crafts and activities that focus on Feast Days of the Catholic Church throughout the Liturgical year.
Once we started doing these crafts with my daughter, I realized that Feast Days were passing by every month, and we hardly recognized them. Sometimes I talked about individual saints, but I rarely made plans to celebrate or teach my children about these incredible holy men and women.
"Follow the saints because those who follow them will become saints." Pope Saint Clement I
That quickly changed because we scheduled all the art activities and crafts into our lesson plan books. The book includes several craft activities for Advent, Christmas, Lent, and Holy Week. It also has several activities for the Blessed Virgin Mary, including The Annunciation, Visitation, Presentation of Jesus, the Nativity of Mary, the Feast of the Assumption, and the Immaculate Conception. Guardian Angels, St. Patrick, St. Nicholas, and St. John the Baptist are all included in the book too.
The crafts were so engaging that we had to plan ahead for enough materials for our other children because they all wanted to do them. What started as Art lessons for our first-grade daughter turned into family craft activities to learn about, reverence, and celebrate the saints.
Our favorite activity was making a candle for the Queen-ship of the Blessed Virgin Mary. It is a safe and easy-to-do craft that a 6-year-old can do to make a traditional devotional candle. We have used her candle for over a year to pray and practice our Catholic Prayers. My children also love any opportunity to cut, color, and apply glitter. That pretty much describes half of the activities in the book.
Cupcakes with the Saints
During August, Catholics celebrate the Assumption of Mary and the Queen-ship of Mary. We start our school year in August, and it happens to be a month full of birthday celebrations in my family. So we started crafting for the feast days of Mary during the same month we had a few birthday celebrations.
One day we had family stopping by. So I went to the grocery store to pick up some cupcakes for us to celebrate a birthday and they were amazing. We had no idea that we lived down the street from a bakery that makes the most delicious cupcakes! They are cheap too!
Naturally, we looked for any opportunity (or excuse) to buy more cupcakes. So once September 8th came around (the Nativity of the Blessed Virgin Mary), we pulled out the craft book to make cards for Mary, and I went to buy pink and blue cupcakes. We had a birthday party for Mary.
That is how I came up with this "No-Fail Formula" of cupcakes and crafts for celebrating Feast Days. It gives us a fun (and delicious) way to learn about Catholic saints.
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