Feast of St Patrick - A Liturgical Playdate

One thing that I LOVE about blogging is the community that it forms and the amazing resources that it provides!  It is so easy to get almost intimidated when you enter the world of Catholic blogs or Pinterest, but the great thing that I have learned is that everyone is different and we do not need to do things the way other people do things.  More than that, we may not even called to do those things!  We are called to live our vocations to the best of our ability, and to do for our families what is best for their individual needs.  Keeping that in mind I try to use this community to praise others for the amazing, inspiring things that they are doing, support them during times of need and take little pieces here and there that I can apply to my life and vocations.

A favorite blogger of mine has always been Kendra Tierney from Catholic All Year!  She is a Catholic homeschooling momma of 7 children (soon to be 8) who in the most down to earth, realistic way talks about how they live their life and live the liturgical year.  One thing that she recently talked about was creating Liturgical Playdates, calling it Liturgical Living for Beginners (Yup, that's Me!!)  If you know me in real life you would know that I am not much of the hostess, and I am really good at the basics.  Either way, I decided to give it a go and throw a St Patrick's Feast Day Liturgical Playdate.  I invited 3 other homeschool moms who are dear friends of mine and with their children and mine there was a total of 11 children for a morning of fun and learning.

Here is what we did!

• Snacks & Decorations:
• It was so much fun to find little decorations to celebrate St Patrick's Day!  Most of our decorations we picked up at Hobby Lobby and we also used our St Patrick doll from Shining Light and also the St Patrick from our Peg Doll set. 
   
  
• For snacks we made rainbow fruit kebabs, some goldfish crackers, fun St Patrtick's Day cookies, skittles (to continue the rainbow fun) and green lemonade! 
  
  
• Story Time: 
• We read Patrick:  Patron Saint of Ireland by Tomie dePaola, which is the book included for this feast day in Catholic Moasic.  We love all Tomie dePaola books and this one was great.  The kids enjoyed learning the history of St Patrick and the Legends of St Patrick at the end of the story include the Legend of the Shamrock, which led perfectly into our craft and the Legend of the Snakes which blended into our game!
  
  
  
• Craft
• We made this Shamrock craft from Two Os+ more, that helps little kids understand the 3 parts of the trinity as 1!  Since all of the children at our playdate were 6 years old and under I pre-cut a lot of the craft so that it was easier for them to put it together.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
• Song:
• As we were doing our craft we taught the kids the St Patrick's Day Song from CatholicIcing.com.  It was a cute and easy song to help everyone understand the Trinity!
  
• Learning Fun
• I printed off the St Patrick's Day Printables and Workbook Packet from reallifeathome.com.  Again, because we were only hosting children ages 6 and under I choose what activities I thought they would be able to do and arranged them from easiest (coloring sheets) to hardest (fill in the number, mazes, etc).  I also printed off some extra coloring sheets of St Patrick and the Trinity Shamrock for the babies to scribble on (there are 4 children under the age of 2 years old!)

• Game:
• We have 3 boys and so a lot of our friends are little boys, including most the children at our liturgical playdate.  I thought the perfect game to play would be Throwing the Snakes out of Ireland.  St. Patrick is said to have thrown the snakes out of Ireland with his drum so we made a pretend island and took lots of little rubber snakes and let the kids bang a drum and then throw the snakes off.  Very simple, but the kids LOVED it!

 

 
• Movie:
• We love all of the CCC Saints and Heroes movies and Patrick: Brave Shepherd of the Emerald Isle is one of our favorites.  It is such a fun, catchy movie to tell the story of St Patrick.  The kids were so busy that they did not really sit down and watch it entirely but enjoyed watching clips of it while they ate their snack!
  

Then the kids played, played and played some more and us moms got some much needed time for great conversation and fellowship!  We then gave out little goodie bags include a laminated St Patrick's Saint Card, a few shamrock coins and skittles!  Plus the kids also got to take home their fun St Patrick's Day cup from snack time.  It was so much fun and I hope to continue adding more liturgical playdates throughout the year for some great learning fun with friends!

 

Happy Feast of St Patrick from our family to yours!