A couple of weeks ago, I taught our Pre-K through 2nd grade homeschool children at our monthly gathering. I first read the book, The 3 Trees, which is a beautiful story and I highly recommend it during the Lenten or Advent season.

For the craft idea, I went to Lacy's blog at Catholic Icing for ideas and inspiration and as usual I was not disappointed with the wealth of resources she shares.  So using the ideas in her post here and the link she had to here, I came up with my own version of the Stations of the Cross bags for the children to make.
I could not find purple (the liturgical color during Lent) bags so I bought small white bags and tied a purple ribbon around the bags as pictured above.  On the outside of the bag the children cut out the image of Jesus as the Divine Mercy and glued it to the bag. It's difficult to see from the picture above, but on the bottom of every Divine Mercy image there is the phrase, "Jesus I trust in You," which were the words that Jesus gave Sister Maria Faustina along with how the image was to look.  Divine Mercy Sunday is celebrated the first Sunday after Easter Sunday. On the back of the bags the children glued information about the Divine Mercy image that I compiled from information on a couple of websites.
I gave each child a ziplock bag of symbols that represented each station of the cross.  We used the black and white fold out booklet that I assembled from the link here to review each station and then they had to find the symbol in their ziplock bag and put it into their white bag.  Here is a picture of the symbols a friend and I gathered for the bags.  In the background is the stations bag with the accordion folded black and white pictures and names of each station:
The white table had dirt spots on it so this isn't the prettiest background for this picture :( Anyway from left to right in the photo each of the 15 children in attendance had:

Station 1: Jesus is condemned to death. We used a piece of brown yarn to symbolize the binding of Jesus' hands
Station 2: Jesus carries his cross. At the Dollar Tree my friend found an egg filled with small white candy crosses so each child got a small cross (I wouldn't recommend this kind of cross since some of the crosses got crushed or the kid's ate them! :)
Station 3: Jesus falls the first time. Symbolize this with a band-aid with a "1"
Station 4: Jesus meets his mother. For this, each child had a holy card of Mary holding the rosary that I created by finding the image on the computer, copying and pasting into a word document, printed, then laminated.
Station 5: Simon helps Jesus carry his cross. praying hand shaped note paper that a friend found in the Dollar Tree and I wrote "helping hand" and laminated
Station 6: Veronica wipes Jesus' face. Just take a scrap of white fabric, but I didn't draw Jesus' face on it (there is only so much time in a day! :) ) and said the children could do that at home.
Station 7: Jesus falls the second time. A band-aid with a "2".
Station 8: Jesus meets the women of Jerusalem. A tissue to dry their tears.
Station 9: Jesus falls the third time. Draw a "3" on a band-aid.
Station 10: Jesus is stripped of his garments. purple piece of felt
Station 11: Jesus is nailed to the cross. 3 nails.
Station 12: Jesus dies on the cross. Symbolize this with another holy card of Jesus on the cross. I found a crucifix image on the computer that I liked, copied and pasted into a word document, printed, then laminated.
Station 13: Jesus is taken down from the cross. A picture of Michelangelo's Pieta that I copied and pasted into a word document, printed, then laminated.
Station 14: Jesus is laid in the tomb. We symbolized this with a rock- for sealing the tomb. 

I also gave each child a sheet of Stations of the Cross stickers that I found at the Dollar Tree thanks to Lacy blogging about this good find here. Part of these stickers are pictured in the bottom right corner of photo above. I know one Dollar Tree in my town had the stickers and one didn't.  I took a picture of all the Catholic religious stickers since I felt like I hit the jackpot! Thanks Lacy for the tip! I really just wanted to buy the whole display, but instead I bought one of each of the 8 kinds! :)

After the children assembled their stations of the cross bags, we had a snack of pretzels and I read them the story, Walter the Baker by Eric Carle, another cute and highly recommended book.  At the end of the story, it gives a little history about pretzels.
It says, "The word pretzel comes from the Latin word bracchium, meaning "arm".  The pretzel was originally a simple bread eaten during Lent.  Its shape is based on an ancient position for prayer in which the arms were folded across the chest and the hands were placed on opposite shoulders."
At the beginning of Lent, we made some pretzels following this simple recipe from Holy Heroes Lenten Adventure.


You can read Lacy's Pretzels for Lent post for further ideas and links. (Can you tell I think Lacy's blog is awesome?!!? :) ) By the way, I link up to other blogs, like Lacy's, to share so many fantastic ideas with my visitors and to give credit where credit is due, but I also link up so I can refer to these links in the future from my own blog here. 

Here is a picture I took of our pretzels:

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 There's this cabinet in our kitchen that I put some special Marian statues in, glassware, and cookbooks. In the cabinet is also another one of my 10 year old daughter's art projects she completed in a last year's homeschool art class....Can you find it?


This is a 2 headed dragon my son created based on reading a descriptive paragraph and then he had to draw the picture from the descriptive words.  I think it was an assignment a while ago in his writing lesson.



My 6 year old daughter wrapped this note in a gift bag and handed it to my hubby and me this week.  When we opened this beautiful stenciled butterfly on this post-it note, we were both touched with her stenciled creation and the words she included on it: "I Love You Mom, I Love You Dad."  A keeper, for sure.

Just today, my daughter and her friend were playing with the sidewalk chalk and they created this very long hopscotch path.  The two girls are standing at the end of the hopscotch.  They loved hopping with one and two feet on the many numbers, numbers 0-32!

This past Monday, I took my cupcakes to a friend's birthday party at a local roller skating rink. This is my youngest, 3 1/2 years old, wearing skates for the first time.  She went around the rink with my assistance, but had no fear of falling down or skating on her own!

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This year in science we have been studying ocean creatures using Exploring Creation with Zoology 2: Swimming Creatures of the Fifth Day from Apologia Science, which we are enjoying very much!  With this text, I also bought one Notebooking Journal that follows the text and includes questions, crossword puzzles, and mini-books for each chapter.

Apologia books are faith-based texts that are packed with lots of information and science experiments for each lesson.  Throughout the Apologia books, they recognize that our awesome Creator made the world around us and He made wonderful creatures on land and sea.  It is amazing to study God's wonders through this great science curriculum!

I decided to buy the Zoology 2: Swimming Creatures of the Fifth Day Deluxe Science Kit at the beginning of the school year from Creation Sensation so all the experiment materials would be gathered for me and mailed to my door.  Each Apologia text does include an extensive materials list at the beginning of the books, but I wanted to save time from hunting down items by purchasing the kit. I was excited to win the Apologia Anatomy Science Kit this past summer through Creation Sensation's Facebook page!  I'm thinking since I already have the science kit, I'll do Anatomy next year.

One item that was in our kit that corresponds with Lesson 8: Crustaceans is an envelope of sea monkey or triop eggs.  Triops, sometimes called tadpole shrimp (not true shrimp ,but shrimp-like) are tiny crustaceans that can stay inside their eggs for many years in a dry state.  They only hatch if they have been dried first.  It's when we followed the directions on the envelope and dumped the eggs into water in our small habitat pictured above, that our triops hatched and began swimming around.  We have  4 of these little creatures swimming around and my son was especially happy to see them hatch since he was the one who worried the most that we somehow killed them! Unfortunately, these crustaceans only live a few months, so we are enjoying them while we can.
On page 171 of the Zoology 2: Swimming Creatures of the Fifth Day, there is a science experiment in the cephalopod chapter to learn about buoyancy. On yesterday's post, I came up with Water Art, using the eyedropper that was used for this experiment. The above picture shows the textbook open to where the experiment is with the materials used: glass of water, water bottle filled with water, 2 different eyedroppers decorated with google eyes and orange and yellow chenille sticks.

The idea was to fill the eyedropper with a little bit of water by placing it inside the glass and squeezing and then put it into the water bottle.  Here is the eyedropper in the glass of water:

After we put the eyedropper in the water bottle and closed the lid tightly, my children squeezed the bottle really hard so the eyedropper sunk (because water rushed into the eyedropper, making it heavier) and then the eyedropper rose to the top when they released the pressure, water rushed out of the eyedropper, making it lighter.
We were very excited that this experiment worked and my son was so happy when he saw the sinking and rising of the eyedropper for the first time!  I was glad we got the same results as the book since I get frustrated when experiments don't go as they should! :)

This easy and quick experiment was used to explain that some cephalopods, (what's a cephalopod? It's in the text, of course) like the nautilus, can control their buoyancy like we demonstrated with the bottle of water and the eyedropper.  Nautiluses can take in water, which makes them heavier, then makes them sink, or they can expel water to become lighter, and they rise in the ocean water.  The book mentioned that submarines do the same thing when they fills tanks with ocean water to sink and then submarines push water out of the tanks to rise.

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This was my 10 year old daughter's latest painting on canvas at her homeschool art class that she takes each week.  She loves the character Susan from Narnia which inspired her love for archery.   The teacher asked her to bring a picture in to sketch and paint so we found this girl with a bow and arrow in clipart on our computer for my daughter to copy.  I wish I had the original clipart, but she copied it very well.

This is the perspective sketch my 10 year old daughter recently completed in the art class.


My 6 year old daughter colored this heart template with red and green lines around the border.  Christmas in April ?



I will post about a science experiment we did this morning on tomorrow's post, but look what I thought of with some of the materials we used in our experiment...Water "Art" !

 Plastic cups filled with water and food coloring + an eyedropper = keeping my 3 and 6 year old busy for a little while as I went upstairs to start my older son and daughter's homeschool lessons!

They just squeezed up some colored water with the eyedropper and squirted it into another cup and watched the color changes.


So I know this is not the most creative activity I could come up with, but I was just so happy to think of something quick and easy off the top of my head and have my 2 younger children enjoy for a little while at least...that is until my 3 year old spilled the water onto the floor and the table! :)  Oh well, it was fun while it lasted!

Please join Lynda, Anna-Marie and myself for April's No Ordinary Blog Hop (NOBH). You can link up any or all your posts for the entire month of April. The blogger with the most posts will be awarded a Star Blogger Award!  Click below for details!