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