A Slice of Smith Life: "O" Antiphons Lapbook

Like I mentioned in my last post, this Advent season I've made a conscious effort to try to learn and embrace the "O" Antiphon prayers and traditions as best as possible with my limited time and energy. I spent many hours reading and researching great websites (and stayed up way too late) to learn about the "O" Antiphon prayers and then several more hours were spent (while my 6 year old entertained the baby) creating a lapbook from several sources in hopes that our family could learn more together.

With Lacy's post HERE at Catholic Icing and Chris' "O" Antiphon lapbook post HERE at Campfires and Cleats, I was inspired to create a lapbook for my children. :) I hope that this post will inspire you to learn more about the octave (8 days) before Christmas or the "Golden Nights ".

I thought having my kids create a lapbook would be a fun way to learn the "O" Antiphons. The lapbook was compiled and created from several sources which I will link in hopes that if you try this yourself, it will save you time and not take as long as it did for me. :) The lapbook includes general information, a novena, Latin and English prayers, and coloring pages.

The materials are basic: 2 file folders, printouts (refer to links below), one rectangular piece of purple cardstock and one rectangular piece of white cardstock (that is glued on the cover) , scissors, glue, crayons/coloring pencils.

I used 2 file folders, one yellow and one purple, to go with the Golden Nights and Advent theme. I cut the tabs off the tops of the folders to make the sides look more even. (the right side of the folders below had the tabs that I cut off).

I then inserted the purple folder into the yellow one and hole punched 2 holes on the left side of the folders, as shown in picture below.

I tied purple curling ribbon through the two holes to bind the folders together.

The Cover:
The top of the lapbook cover (O Antiphons general information) was printed from Lacy at Catholic Icing's Advent Christmas Planner that you can purchase HERE. I folded the O Antiphons information in half, glued the bottom half, then glued a rectangular piece of purple cardstock (I actually just cut out a rectangle from another purple file folder) to the back of the top half as shown below.

The information that is glued in the middle of the purple rectangle was taken from THIS post. I printed copies of the first page and cut out this short paragraph: The "O" Antiphons are the verses for the ancient hymn O Come, O Come Emmanuel. The first letter of the Messianic titles: Emmanuel, Rex, Oriens, Clavis, Radix, Adonai, Sapientia—spell out Latin words ERO CRAS, meaning, "Tomorrow, I will come."

Then each of my children wrote "O" Antiphons Lapbook on white cardstock and glued in the middle of front cover. (We forgot to add the "s" on "Antiphon" on their cover :) )

The "Golden Nights" Novena that is shown above was printed from Lacy's Advent Christmas Planner. She explained how the novena starts on Dec. 16 so I put that on the cover. If you want to include the novena throughout your lapbook, but don't have Lacy's planner you could do a search on "Christmas Novenas" and find a prayer that starts on Dec. 16.

2nd page (Dec. 17) and 3rd page (Dec. 18)

On the yellow and purple sides of the lapbook at the top is the corresponding O Antiphons and Corresponding Symbols. The chart for these symbols for each day can be found HERE. The coloring pages can be found HERE. The Novena prayer for each day that is glued onto the bottom of each page was copied from Lacy's Advent Christmas Planner.

4th page (Dec. 19) and 5th page (Dec. 20).....refer to links above for printouts

6th Page (Dec. 21) and 7th page (Dec. 22)...refer to links above for printouts

Last page (Dec. 23)....refer to links above for printouts

I wanted to include the last day of the Christmas Novena (Dec. 24) onto the back cover so I folded it and glued it to the back of the Dec. 23 Novena prayers (if that makes sense). Here's pictures I took to show you what I mean:

And that's the end of the "O" Antiphons lapbook :)

Here are some pictures of my children starting their lapbooks. We worked on the cover and Dec. 17 page tonight. All my efforts were worth it as I heard one of my daughters exclaim, "This is the best Advent ever!" and "This is so fun!" :-) (which also tells me I should be doing more of this "fun" stuff with my kiddos :-/ )

This is obviously a work in progress as I hope to have my children cut out, paste, and color each page during the "Golden Nights". I plan to pull out these lapbooks each year so my children will always have a prayer guide during these last days of Advent. I hope to maybe make/buy ornaments some year to go with the "O" Antiphons as I have seen some beautiful ones on the internet!

I plan to have my family listen to the video clips found HERE of the O Antiphons being sung to celebrate the Golden Nights. Just beautiful!

Update: Be sure to check out Jessica's O Antiphons 2014 post HERE at Shower of Roses with lots of fun ideas to celebrate these special days during Advent!

May you have blessed Golden Nights as we get closer to celebrating the birth of Jesus!

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Wow! Tracy this looks great! I'm not sure I can pull this together this year but I'm pinning it! Hope to get it all together for the kids to create next year! Love it!

December 18, 2013 at 8:33 AM