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Holy Guardian Angels Feast

angel-craft-3 Happy feast of the Holy Guardian Angels! Today we have a great opportunity to help our children  develop a  deeper relationship, understanding and appreciation of angels.

What is an Angel

An angel is a pure spirit created by God. The English word “angel” comes from the Greek angelos, which means ‘messenger’. For more information about angels see my previous post Feast of the Holy Angels.

My kids are super excited to have another tea party followed by crafts this afternoon. Each year for this special feast we have made lots of angels which we have used to decorate our home by hanging them off our dinning room light and displaying them on the wall.

Last year the kids made three to four angels each. They made St. Michael, St. Raphael, St. Gabriel and an angel to represent their guardian angel. They used a sword with St. Michael and came up with other symbols to represent the different angels.  We then glued prayers onto some of the angels.

This craft is super easy to make and personalized as each child gets to trace and use their hands as the angels wings. The kids love tracing their hands hence why they each wanted to keep making more angels. I can’t think of a year when the kids only made one angel each. Here is my ANGEL Craft post with instructions.

Here are some prayers that you can include on the angels:

PRAYER TO your Guardian AngelIMG_0216

Angel of God,
my guardian dear,
To whom God’s love
commits me here,
Ever this day,
be at my side,
To light and guard,
Rule and guide.
Amen.

 

PRAYER TO Saint Michael the Archangel

St. Michael the Archangel,
defend us in battle.
Be our defense against the wickedness and snares of the Devil.
May God rebuke him, we humbly pray,
and do thou,
O Prince of the heavenly hosts,
by the power of God,
thrust into hell Satan,
and all the evil spirits,
who prowl about the world
seeking the ruin of souls. Amen.

 

PRAYER TO Saint Gabriel

Blessed Saint Gabriel, Archangel We beseech you to intercede for us at the throne of divine mercy:
As you announced the mystery of the Incarnation to Mary,
so through your prayers may we receive strength of faith and courage of spirit,
and thus find favor with God and redemption through Christ Our Lord.
May we sing the praise of God our Savior with the angels and saints in heaven forever and ever. Amen.

 

Other Fun Crafts for the Feast of the Holy Angels:

celebrate-feast-day-of-guardian-angels-october-21

List of sites with free printable or great easy ideas for crafts to do with kids on the feast of the angels:

Catholic Icing has 10 great ideas to help celebrate the Feast of the Guardian Angels

Cute Hand Print Angel Craft

Free Printable Angel for Preschools in Colour or Black & White

Easy Stand-up Angel

Nice Peppermint Angel Craft – Makes a nice Christmas gift too!

Nice Full Colour Old Fashion Stand-Up Angels

 

 

angels

 

Happy Feast of St Therese!

Today is just such a beautiful and special day. It is a day to celebrate an incredible women and soul. One who inspires me continuously to strive to do everything with more love, more joy and more smiles. St. Therese may have lived for 24 years but her example and love will live on forever.

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Feast days are always such a fun way to bring joy and love into your home. Whom doesn’t love to celebrate – especially children? So today after school we will pull out our fancy fine china tea cups, our beautiful teapot from my sister and a delicious baked good (still need to make this lol).  We will gather around talk about St Therese beautiful life, her example and how we can show love more in all that we do. Then after enjoying our goodies we will make some new crafts that I found for us.

rosecelery

Celery Rose Painting

Who doesn’t love pinterest – at the click of a few buttons you find so much inspiration. I found this adorable simple and fun painting to make – you simply need white paper, green & paint for the roses (red, purple, pink, yellow, and/or blue) paint, celery, scissors, and your imagination.  You could even use coloured construction paper and use white paint instead for white roses. We will have a lot of fun making different variations with this idea. It is also a great craft from preschoolers to adulthood.

Here are some of the paintings we made at our tea party today after school!

image

st.tereseoflisieux_printable_1

St Therese Greeting and Prayer Cards

I found wonderful website this week that I just have to share its called Shining Light Dolls. This wonderful website offers lots of free cute and colourful Catholic Saint and Mary printable. These images will come in handy throughout the year – with all saints day coming up, birthdays, feasts. My head is just whirling with ideas to use these cute images with.

In past years 0ne craft that the kids and I have enjoyed making on the feast of St Therese is greeting cards which we mail out to grandparents, great grandparents, godparents and some aunts. After finding this lovely image of St Therese I know we will have to send this beautiful image out without greeting cards to family members with a special love of St Therese. We will print the image, print out beautiful quotes by St Therese and then glue them on coloured paper and personalize the cards.

One of my favourite quotes is: Without love, deeds, even the most brilliant, count as nothing.  Story of a Soul, Chapter VIII

If you looking for a cute or special gift for a baptism or birthday Shining Light Dolls have adorable little dolls, charms and prayers cards too!

Saint Therese of LisieuxLovely St Therese Paper Doll

Another craft ideas is this adorable free St Therese paper doll. Paper Dali offers this free, cute printable, she even has a page of accessories with roses, a cross and the holy face of Jesus. I would recommend printing this on card stock if possible if not, I would colour the doll, then glue it to construction paper, let it dry and then cut out the doll so that it is stronger and lasts longer for your little girl!

 

 

 

 

sacrifice-beads-coloursSt Therese Good Deed/Sacrifice Beads

A fun and wonderful activity to make for the feast of St. Therese, advent, lent, preparing for 1st Holy Communion, as a baptism gift or a catechism group activity is the St. Therese Good Deed/Sacrifice Beads. You can find instructions on how to Make the Good Deed/Sacrifice Beads here. What better way to teach the children how to offer up little acts of love throughout the day then by following little St. Therese own example as she did as a child. st-therese-and-lisieux-page-sm To the right is a picture of the beads used by St Therese when she was little. She used her beads faithfully each day as she prepared for her holy communion. What I love about St. Therese is that she offered Jesus the good too – ie she would eat her dinner and she would tell Jesus that the dessert was for him, she offered up her joy, not only her suffering. I think that this is an important step towards making your entire day and act of prayer and love as she strived to do daily.

Here is a link to an older post when we made a beautiful 3D Rose craft to celebrate the feast of St Therese.

If you have other craft ideas please share them in the comments below!

Whatever you do today, wherever you go, may you spread love and joy!

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Amazing Saint Craft & Gift!

Every now and then you fall in love with something that is just so amazing that you have to share it! Well a few weeks ago Catholic Icing came out with this beautiful A-Z full color Saint Set – it is just gorgeous! I fell in love and purchased the set right away it was on sale for $6 at the time but is still only $8. I had it printed in glossy card stock paper so that we didn’t have to wait for 26 toilet roll holders. Let me tell you they printed beautifully. They are so beautiful we couldn’t keep them to ourselves  so we printed them and have given them as a little surprise gift to our godchildren as well as some close friends. Everyone whom has received them has glowed as they received them!

saint-therese-printable-craft

There is so many ways you can use these too:

  • cut them and use them as decorations to reinforce feast days or letters of the alphabet
  • paper dolls
  • great craft for a catechism class or classroom
  • Makes a great gift!
  • link together as a banner in a room
  • cut and tape side by side to use as wall paper
  • cut the saints out and glue them on to cards for name days, baptisms, birthdays

I am sure people have even better ideas then I do – so if you do please share them on the comments below!

saints

Happy Feast of the Archangels!

A couple weeks ago I was apart of a little discussion on Facebook. Another women had asked ‘how do you celebrate the feast of St. Michael”, to which I replied a craft, prayers and a tea party. I laughed as I posted it and it turned out my post caused much laughter as people thought about brave St. Michael being celebrated in such a way. But I was not alone in celebrating the feast with tea and angel food cake. My kids love celebrating feast days – we are blessed with a faith that has so many wonderful saints and traditions to celebrate. You could celebrate everyday is you wanted to really with the list of saints. We are just so blessed.

May your family have a blessed and joy filled feast of the Archangels!

happysaints

 

St. Michael the Archangel means ‘Who is like God’ – whom is referred to as the ‘prince’ of the heavenly hosts and whom can be seen in the book of Revelations. (Jude 1:9)  Free St. Michael the Archangel Colouring Page by Matilda

Angel Gabriel –means ‘Strength of God’ –who is best  known for the Annunciation to Mary, that she would be the Mother of Jesus, the Son of God (Luke 1:26-38) – Nice St. Gabriel Colouring Page by Matilda

Angel Raphael – means ‘Medicine of God’ -whom we see in the book of Tobas Free St. Raphael Colouring Page by Matilda

angels

Fun joke & animal fact app for families and kids!

In April our family began to start sharing jokes regularly with one another. My husband would look up new knock, knock jokes to share with our children – which would always result in lots of laughter and to our kids making their own knock, knocks and other jokes. Our four year old son really had a hard time getting the lines down at first he would tell them like this:

“Knock, knock” he would say “Who is..” I would start to reply and he would interrupt “Knock, knock who is there, who’s is the who!” it would lead me to giggling because he just wasn’t able to understand taking turns! But as time went on he started to grasp how to tell the jokes and really would get into it! One of his favorite jokes now is:

“Knock, knock”
“Who’s there?”
“Impatient cow!”
“Impatient…”
“Impatient cow MOOOOO!”

Which would lead to him making up one of his own such as:

“Knock, Knock”
“Who is there?”
“Cow”
“Cow who?”
“Can cow open the door!”

My daughter loved making up jokes and brainstorming about funny things different animals might do. When ever we had a gust over she would have to show them the jokes we had laid out with graphics to date! Here is one of the jokes she made of that we have included in the app:

As the months went on we started making up more of our own jokes. In the summer time when we were in a book store I saw a beautiful book in the children’s section with wonderful animal pictures – I showed it to my husband and said – you know you could make this with jokes so easily! The idea stayed in his mind for a few weeks and then one day he decided – he would make a joke app with beautiful animal images that kids could enjoy! We thought about it more and decided we would also add our families love of animals by including animal facts. Our family really enjoys animals – my older brother jokes that I am prepping my daughter to become a zoologist! We have enjoyed feeding animals at petting zoos, nature trails and farms so much – that when my son was two he would cry when we would go for a walk a wild squirrel or bird would not feed from his hand – he just could not grasp why they would not let him pet them or feed them!

We hope others enjoy this cute LittleCritter joke & animal fact app that we have enjoyed putting together so that other families can enjoy some wonderful laughs, make up their own jokes and enjoy each other’s company – at home, waiting at for an appointment or just when you need to add a little sunshine to your day!

Please feel free to share your families favorite joke or animal fact with us too – we would love to hear from you!

Saint Kateri – Lily of the Mohawks!

On October 21st, 2012 a blessed becomes a Saint! The beautiful young women who lived from 1656-1680 whom we have known as blessed will now be Saint Kateri. Beatified by Blessed John Paul II in 1980, Kateri will be proclaimed the first Native woman saint by Pope Benedict XVI on October 21.

Tekakwitha’s baptismal name was Catherine, which in the Iroquois languages is Kateri. She lived a life of faith and hope! Kateri died at the young age of 24. Her last words are said to be, “Jesus, I love You!”. She is the patron saint of the environment and ecology.

Kateri’s Feast day: is April 17th (in Canada) and July 14 (in USA)
Here is a link to some beautiful original paintings of St. Kateri: Lily of the Mohawks 1 and 2 by Dorothy Speiser

“I am no longer my own. I have given myself entirely to Jesus Christ.”~ St. Kateri

 With so much excitement building around this special canonization I thought I needed to get in on spreading the joy too! Here are links to some beautiful colouring pages and crafts to help celebrate the special day with your children:

Cute St. Kateri Paper Doll

Catholic Icing has some lovely craft ideas to help celebrate St. Kateri

Free printable craft sheet for creating Christian native headband from Catholicinspired.com

Blessed Kateri Colouring Page   from Florida Centre for Peace

Holy Heros is offering a Free 6 page colouring book on St. Kateri 

Holy Heros is also offering a great deal spend over $15 and get a free Glory Stories CD of St. Kateri’s and St. Cecilia’s life and a free holy card too!

We enjoyed celebrating her feast on April 17th this year!

Adorable St. Kateri Finger Puppet from Pinterest!

Thoughts to Make Your Heart Sing!

I have very exciting news children’s award winning author Sally Lloyd-Jones has written a new book Thoughts to Make Your Heart Sing  – we are so excited to read this new book. She is one of our favourite authors for children. Her previous book also illustrated by JAGO The Jesus Storybook Bible: Every Story Whispers His Name is my eldest daughter’s favourite book of all time! We have read it so many times the binding is starting to give – which says alot because the book is so well made. We even bought the deluxe edition so that we have the book on CD and listen to it in the car.

I frequently catch my daughter telling her brother stories and answering his faith questions with quotes from the Jesus Story Book Bible. We have given so many of these books away as gifts too! This book is well illustrated and so beautifully written you can’t wait to read the next story. It is a written starting with creation showing God’s plan of love for  his people and weaving and revealing his plan of salvation through the old and new Testament. It is written for children but every adult who reads this book grows spiritually too! My husband and I would update each other on the stories we missed as we were rotating books at bedtime when we first started to read the book! We just didn’t want to miss out on the journey through this amazing book. You can see my previous post on this book here!

So when I heard an interview on the radio with Sally Lloyd-Jones yesterday answering questions about her new book I was so ecstatic that I per-ordered Thoughts to Make Your Heart Sing today for a Christmas gift for the kids. She wrote this book as her niece was being bullied at school and she thought if only her niece knew how much she was loved by her heavenly father it would make all the difference. Then she decided I will write a book with stories to tell her just this and so her beautiful book was written!

Here is a description of the book from its official website: “Thoughts to Make Your Heart Sing shares profound spiritual truths from the Bible told in a conversational tone—drawing insights from creation, history, science, and the writings of great thinkers, preachers, writers, and more—to turn the reader’s eyes toward the God who loves them with a Never Stopping, Never Giving Up, Unbreaking, Always And Forever Love.” Source: http://thoughtstomakeyourheartsing.com/

So if your looking for the perfect gift for a child in your life look no further! I recommend The Jesus Storybook Bible: Every Story Whispers His Name or Thoughts to Make Your Heart Sing or for babies and preschoolers try her other amazing  Lift-the-Flap Bible

St. Therese 3D Rose Craft

Happy Feast of St. Therese – may her life of little ways be an inspiration to us all and a reminder that it is doing everything in and out of love that will bring about the biggest change of all in our hearts, minds, lives and world. So lets change this world with love!

My husband and I made a simple 3D rose craft to use to celebrate the feast of St. Therese, bring some nice colour to you dining table and help inspire the kids to join in spread love in lots of little ways!

Step 2 – Have your child write an act of love, a prayer or sacrifice that they would like to offer in love to our Lord, like St. Therese did. You can learn more about the Little ways here

Step 3 – Colour in the rose petals and centre piece.

Step 4 – Cut out rose petals along dotted line, so that the is a small slit in each petal, cut out the centre piece too.
Step 5 – Fold one slit over the other and glue or tape it together so that it makes the petal curve upwards.
Step 6 – Take your first petal, then take your second petal and either tape it on the back (if you are using crayons this is recommended) or glue the petals together. You will want the petals to overlap just before the half way point.Repeats for all petals.

Step 7 – Tape/glue the 3rd petal behind the middle of the 2nd petal, continue until your petals are forming a nice round bud (you may only need to use 5).

Step 8 – Glue/Tape Centre piece

Step 9 – Admire your child’s masterpiece!

3D St. Therese Rose with Little Acts of Love on each Petal!

Alternative option would be to use the template to cut out coloured construction paper petals to form a bouquet of colours!

3D St. Therese Rose!

Today only Holy Heroes is offering a beautiful free downloadable pdf colouring book! Great to print and use through out the year for your church bag, rain days or craft time! Click on the image below for the colouring book!

You can also purchase a wonderful CD by Glory Stories on their website about the life of St. Therese and Saint Miguel de la Mora of the Knights of Columbus.

Cute and Easy Angel Craft for kids!

Here is a simple craft for to use for the feast of the Holy Angels or to simply help teach your child or Sunday school class the Guardian Angel Prayer.

This can serve as a beautiful reminder that your child is always in the presence of their guardian angel!

Here is the  full colour pdf  cut out Angel Craft

Step 1 – Print PDF

Step 2 – Cut out pieces

Step 3 – Glue wings so that the thumbs are touching and over lapping.

Step 4 – Glue Angels hair onto wings

Step 5 – Glue White gown on to wings, tucked slightly under the hair

Step 6- Glue face on hair and gown

Step 7 – Draw a face and decorate the angel

Step 8 – Practice Prayer and enjoy!

*To personalize the craft only print the first page and then have your child trace their own hands on a coloured piece of paper to use for the wings.

To learn more about angels see Feast of the Holy Angels

Ben-Hur Great Story for Boys!

My son recently read the CCC book Ben-Hur – A Race to Glory at grandma’s house. He fell in love with it right away. So much in fact that we have to borrow it to read it again once we got home.  I coincidently had the DVD of Ben-Hur packed away to give the kids for Easter, so the timing couldn’t have been better.

This is a wonderful story for kids but especially for young boys aged 3-8. It is a story of friendship, perseverance, courage and forgiveness. Encounters with Jesus are seamlessly woven into the story too. Whether your looking for a a great story book or a nice movie -I highly recommend Ben-Hur – A Race to Glory to be added to anyone’s library!

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