Almsgiving with Children

We have been focusing on Prayer, Fasting and Almsgiving during Lent and finding ways to teach each aspect to our young children.  Almsgiving is truly a big part of what we want our children to understand and develop as they grow up.  Having both attended a Jesuit Catholic University my husband and I learned to be Men and Women For and With Others.  We spent a lot of our undergraduate years serving others and learning the importance of giving of ourselves, or time and our services.  Yet, now I ask myself how can I teach our young children the passion of giving to others?

The first thing that we decided that we needed to do was to teach our children about diversity and differences of others.  We think that it is really important for our children to understand that there are people who look different that we do, who are both more and less financially stable than we are, have better and worse physical health that we do, live in better and worse living situations, etc.  We started explaining words that they will hear like poor/rich, hungry, homeless, etc.  We have been reading the Boxcar Children series during our Read Aloud time in our homeschooling and it has been a great opportunity to talk about people who do not have a stable home, who need to work very hard to get a little bit of food and who do not have Dads and Moms to take care of them.

My husband and I had the opportunity to go out on a date night to see the movie The Drop Box in theaters a few weeks ago(they are showing an Encore Night TODAY March 16th if you can try to go).   It was eye opening to see children in need of love and support and beyond that what people GAIN when they give to others.  Even if we are not personally able to adopt or financially support others in the world around us, each one of these people also need our prayers which is a great way to give!

Next, we want our children to know that no matter how much we have or do not have that we want to give to others.  We talked about how we give money each week to our church and how we also give by donating our clothing, toys and food.  We took the opportunity with Fasting from Toys to take some of those toys and donate them to others.  During Lent our parish has opportunities to give canned and dry goods to a local homeless shelter that we participated with as well.

We found so many great activities to help learn about giving that we added to our homeschooling during Lent.  We loved both the Almsgiving Notebook Page and the Almsgiving Worksheet from Drawn2Bcreative.  These were such great basic activities to start getting our children to think about what they have that they can give to others and also how they can give of their love and prayers as well.  Our oldest son LOVED the worksheet of deciding what would be good things to give or not between things like nice clothing, an old banana peel, money, etc!

 

Scott Hahn says in his book Signs of Life, which I have been reading as part of my Lenten reading the following about Almsgiving:

 

"Almsgiving flows naturally and supernaturally from our prayer.  As we draw closer to Jesus, we see him as he is, and we wish to obey him; and he told his followers, in no uncertain terms to give alms (Lk 12:33; Mt 6:2-4).  What's more, as we draw closer to him, we want to be more like him; and he gave all that he had, till he had nothing left to give.  Almsgiving is itself a powerful form of prayer."

During this Lent we have learned so much by focusing on Prayer, Fasting and Almsgiving.  I hope that you and your family are also having a blessed Lent.  Stay tuned for what our family does during Holy Week, our Passion Week Peg Doll set, and some other fun posts coming soon!