Saints Coloring Pages- St. Francis of Assisi

Another Saint coloring page! Check out the beginning here.

Saints Coloring Pages- Bl. Mother Teresa

Another Saint coloring page! Check out the beginning here.

Saints Coloring Pages- Peter and Paul

Back in this post, I showed the Saint murals that we painted in our CCD hallway.  I took the sketches and turned them into matching coloring pages.  So here are two more installments, for the men who built our Church up and out.

Click here for the printables:

Saints Coloring Pages and Murals- The Holy Family

You may have read about my CCD theme All the Saints Greet You! from last year.  One of our projects to make the Saints come alive for the kids was to paint some kid sized murals on the walls in the hallway where our CCD classrooms are.  With the help of some of my Youth Group kids, they turned out pretty cute:

St. Peter

BTW, forgive the awkward angled photos.  Remember I am in a hallway :)

St. Paul

Bl. Mother Teresa

St. Francis of Assisi

St. Therese of Lisieux

St. Patrick

We picked some favorite Saints of the groups, and a couple of them were recently chosen Confirmation Saints of the Youth Group kids.  Therese, Patrick, Francis, and Mother Teresa are all favorites.  Peter and Paul seemed like important contributions, Peter to remind us of the Pope, and our pastor's Confirmation Saint is actually Paul...and it is sort of coincidental that the Paul mural turned out to resemble him...

We also included the Holy Family.  This one is my favorite.  It is at the very end of the hallway on the facing wall, which means Jesus, Mary, and Joseph look over the whole program.

(However, I should admit that if you choose to paint life sized murals, you have to accept that when you are there alone, and you may or may not be working with all of the normal lights on, it is highly likely that out of the corner of your eye you will think that someone is actually standing there. 
It has never completely freaked me out, but I have to admit that when I am working in the basement in my office alone, I have stopped mid-stride many times at a glimpse of the Holy Family at the end of the hall...)

See what I mean?

Anyways, we love them, and the kids love them, and they help us call to mind the holy people who came in faith before us. 

I used sketches to get started with the paintings, and instead of just throwing them away, I turned them into coloring pages.  Here is the first installment, the Holy Family.  Click below for the printable.

Reviewing the Sacraments- Confirmation

 Happy Pentecost!

Enjoy some good music about the Holy Spirit while you read a long post.

We are still in the midst of reviewing the Sacraments in my 5th grade classroom.  Last week, to tie in with Pentecost, we reviewed the Sacrament of Confirmation.  As we are doing these reviews, I am not covering all of the content that we have already discussed, but just trying to drive home a few points for them to remember.

My points this time:
-You receive the Holy Spirit in a unique way at your Confirmation.
-That Holy Spirit is the same Holy Spirit that has always been, from the creation of the world to Pentecost to now.
-At Confirmation, you receive the Gifts of the Holy Spirit, which help you on your journey as a Christian.

So here is the activity:

Give each student a piece of 8 1/2 x 11" paper that is either yellow, orange, or red. (9 x 12" construction paper works just fine too.)

Have them fold it into eighths- ending up with pieces that are 2 3/4 x 4 1/4".  They can then cut on those lines, ending up with eight pieces of paper.  Have them set one piece aside.

Have them take one and draw some kind of flame shape that takes up most of the small sheet of paper.  You could provide a template, but this might be a good opportunity for them to explore their artistic ability and creativity.  They can all look different (see below).  To save time, the students can cut out one flame and then trace it on the stack of six remaining sheets and cut out 2-3 at a time.  This depends on the age and small motor skills of your students.

Then, have them trade the remaining 1/8 of the sheet with someone who had a different color from them.  Have them cut it into 7 strips of equal size. ( I had some students cut it into 8 "squares" and then just throw one away. Whatever works.)

On those seven strips, write the seven gifts of the Holy Spirit: wisdom, knowledge, understanding, fear of the Lord, piety, counsel, and fortitude.

Then on each of the flames, write a brief explanation of the seven Gifts. 

Here are the definitions we used, but you could create your own age appropriate ones or have the students come up with their own.

-helps us see and follow God's will in our lives
-helps us to love others as Jesus calls us to do
-brings us to know more about God and his plan
-aids us in making good choices
-helps us to see God's presence in the world
-strengthens us to give us courage to evangelize
-makes it possible for us to love and respect all God's creation

Then have the kids glue the flames in a notebook (or large sheet of paper.)
We put them in our Sheen Notebooks.

Their next task is to match the Gifts with the descriptions and glue them in.

We added the reminder that "The same Holy Spirit that comes to us at our Confirmation came to the Apostles and Mary at Pentecost!"

We also added the Scripture from Acts 2:1-4- "When the day of Pentecost had come, they were all together in one place. And suddenly there came from heaven a noise like a violent rushing wind, and it filled the whole house where they were sitting. And there appeared to them tongues as of fire  distributing themselves, and they rested on each one of them. And they were all filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak with other tongues, as the Spirit was giving them utterance."

Here are some student examples of their flames: Come Holy Spirit!

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Reviewing the Sacraments- The Eucharist, Part One

Time to review the Sacrament of the Eucharist.
Step One: Beautiful Monstrances.

Mission: find gold things.  Lots of them.  Enough to allow for some creativity.  I scoured Hobby Lobby and found some beautiful gold things, but ended up opting for the following because of price.  Gold things, even the fake ones, are not cheap.  Therefore, I had to be a little choosy.  This craft ended up costing about 40 cents or so per student, so it wasn't terrible, but it wasn't typical for me.  I purchased some gold tissue paper (cheap and a little goes a long way), gold curling ribbon from the wrapping aisle (I had real ribbon first and then realized my terrible expensive mistake), and gold metallic scrapbook paper.  All of these things were cut into equal sized portions and then passed out to the kids.  They got two pieces of scrapbook paper that were 4" x 6", a similar sized piece of tissue paper, and a length of ribbon, of which they could cut off more.  In the picture, there is glitter, but we ended up not using any.  I am not anti-glitter like some teachers, but we just didn't get around to it with this project.

 I then did a little more prep work for the Jesus element.  Kids could totally do this, but I was trying to fit in this art project in a short amount of time, so prep was important.

First. I folded a piece of heavy paper over about 1 1/2".

 I then used my 1 1/4' circle punch.  Such a time saver, but of course, you could cut these by hand.  I left a bit of space between the edge of the punch and the folded edge of the paper.  By watching the underneath of the punch I was able to do this quickly.

 The result was a circle that actually opened up into two attached circles.

 I then pulled out some fabulous stickers that I think I found at Dollar Tree. God bless them for their $1 religious ed supplies.  I also know that Autom has some similar Jesus stickers.

 I used a slightly smaller punch to create circles with Jesus on them that would fit inside of the white circle, like this:

 Here is a bucket of them ready to go for my class:

 And here it is inside my original white double circle.

 Next, I prepped sheets of black paper.  I used 8 1/2 x 11" cardstock.   To make my monstrance, I drew some pencil lines finding the midpoint for the top half of the paper.  Not necessary, but helpful for a student that either needs some spacial guidance...or is a little OCD like me.

 I then drew a rough outline for the base of the monstrance on scratch paper.  This is only half, which I then cut out and used as a stencil.  I recommended this technique to the students, which saved on random unplanned cuts on the rationed gold paper.

 Here is my stencil: (fyi, it actually needed to be a bit longer, but it worked.)

 And here it is in gold with some ribbon wrapped around for depth:

 Then we talked a bit about symmetry.  The kids were challenged to be creative, so I didn't show them anything after this step except the idea that if they started with a vertical line and a horizontal line and then kept splitting them in half, they would end up with a monstrance with balanced radial symmetry.  Except, I probably did not say balanced radial symmetry.  They are only 5th graders, after all!

 Starting with 8 pieces:

 Then add more in between:

 Add a few more and then some layers of concentric circles in the middle, and we are almost finished.

We then glued on a white circle for the host and added a Jesus sticker on the inside, representing how Jesus is hidden in the Eucharist.

Here is my final product:

 And here are some of the students':
I know that you can't see them well, but they are all a little different, and I have gotten lots of comments from students from other classes who have peeked at them in the hallway and have said something like, "Jesus is inside there!"  Yup, that he is.

 We then added the monstrance to our Sheen Notebooks, with a few other things about the Eucharist.

Included is a notes page about Liturgical Vestments and items used at Mass.  The sheet itself is not that exciting, but we used it for a review game.

We also made this cool pop out altar and priest craft, which I will post more about later.  Finally, I included a great quote about the Eucharist.

"Man should tremble, the world should vibrate, 

all heaven should be deeply moved 

when the Son of God appears on the altar 

in the hands of the priest." 

~St. Francis of Assisi