Advent – Little Ways Sacrifice Beads

Free Advent Sight Word Activities and Games

During Advent I know a lot of parents are asking for activities to help teach their children the real meaning of Christmas. There are great Jesse Tree Ornaments to be made and lots of other wonderful activities. But I came across something a little different than I wanted to share.

There is a new sweet website called SightWords.com. It has free tools to help parents and educators teach sight words to kids from Pre-K to 4th Grade. With in this website there is a Christmas section with games and activities with a choice of sacred words for everyone of their activities! (http://www.sightwords.com/sight-words/christmas/)

These are great to do with the kids if your homeschooling, to supplement their education over school holidays or fun to put on the table as place mat activities for Christmas day! There are also some nice colouring pages and fun games for the kids too!

Advent, Crafts

Great Nativity Craft for Kidz!

Great Nativity Craft for Kidz!

I was making gingerbread men with my two little ones the other day, we were trying to come up with different ideas for them. Making them into birds, chickens, dogs, etc. When suddenly I realized that they would make a great base for a nativity scene. Here is the nativity scene we ended up with:

It is fast, fun and easy for kids aged 2 and up:

Materials needed:
1. To print out 2 the following two nativity craft pages
a. Either get your child to colour them in or you can cut them out as use them as stencils to cut out coloured or construction paper.
2. Scissors and glue to cut out
3. Glue to stick the Mary, Jesus and Joseph together (as well as on the to the nativity with the star)
4. A third sheet of paper to make a stable for the scene, the inside cardboard from a cereal box works very well as it’s brown and sturdy
5. Googly eyes or markers to make faces

Other ideas for this craft:
A gift to Jesus:
On Saturday we went to a Christmas party for the kids of our parish. It was lovely at the end they asked the kids to write their daily commitment/gift they would do for Jesus. My daughter whom is 5 decided she’d like to decade of the rosary a day. So each day once she has done this craft or offered another little gift for Jesus (i.e. eating the dinner she didn’t like) –she glues a little star and adds it to the sky over the nativity to make a bright beautiful sky for Christ’s birth!

Including them in your Christmas Cards:
I cut theses sets out in colour, add 4 googly eyes and put them into zip lock bags and mailed them to my nephews and some of my daughter’s friends with our Christmas cards. I might just send them the printed pages instead next year. I always love sending something special with my cards for the kids to do or have for Christmas (i.e . Jesus is the reason for the season stickers, etc).

Advent, Crafts, Saints

St. Nicholas

St. Nicholas Feast Day Ideas!

My kids have just had a blast waiting for the feast of St. Nicholas this year. Reading stores about his life had them very excited for his feast day. A great craft we did this year on his feast day was colouring in this free beautiful holy cards that we found at The St. Nicholas Centre website.

They have these free printable St. Nicholas holy ca rds from Catholic Artworks (which I love) we printed them off in black and white so the kids could color them but they also have them for free in colour too!

Other Ideas for this Craft:

My daughter really enjoyed colouring these in -we have cut them out and are including them with some of the Christmas cards we`re mailing out!
She also cut St. Nicholas out and glued him to a popsicle stick to make her own puppet!
We emailed them to our nephew to enjoy on December 6th too

Great Movies for the Feast of St. Nicholas

We have two great movies we`d like to share about this great saint for kids!

The first is CCC`s video Nicolas: The Boy Who Became Santa – the kids really enjoy this movie. As true to most CCC video`s the try to stick to the real story and teach the virtue of the saint, leaving it as true to life as possible. We purchased our CCC video set from Catholic Video as it was the best deal we could find – the whole set for $99 and free shipping too. It is a great quality cartoon with a great lesson:)

The Other movie we like is Veggie Tales: Saint Nicholas: A Story of Joyful Giving – this is a cute retelling of the story of St. Nicolas. I don`t know about your kids but mine love veggie tales so this has been a big hit with them this year! It has all the veggie tale silliness, goodness and cuteness expect! You have come to know and love!

Here is another great craft for St. Nicholas you might enjoy – A Stocking Craft!

Advent, Crafts, Saints

Stocking Craft for a Christmas gift, ornament or St. Nicholas Day!

A simple stocking craft for your family to enjoy for Christmas
or the feast St. Nicholas!

My daughter loves to be creative and make things but she also loves to give. So having a craft for her to make that turns into a gift after is perfect for us! I came up with this simple stocking craft idea which resulted in us spending the whole day – tracing, cutting, hole punching, stringing, writing, decorating and stuffing.

Step 1: Make a stencil of a stocking that fit on half a piece of paper

Step 2: Take a new piece of construction or card stock paper and folded it in half

Step 3: Trace the stocking on to one side of the folded paper

Step 4: Cut the stocking up (you will end up with two identical stockings)

Step 5: Hold the two pieces of stocking together and hole punch from the one side around to the other

Step 6: Cut a piece of string or ribbon

Step 7: String the ribbon or string through both top holes of one side of the stocking and tie the ribbon or string.

Step 8: Sting the remainder of the ribbon or string through the stocking either top to bottom or to create a different look always from top to top

Step 9: Tie the ribbon or string off.

Step 10: Decorate

Step 11: Hang on the tree or fill with a little treat to make it a gift (we used little raisin boxes, stickers or small bite sized chocolates for ours)

We hope you enjoy making these as much as we did. My 2 year old son really loved helping string the stockings together (great fine motor skill builder).

They work as great ornaments once the recipient has opened and enjoyed their treat!