We had a lot of fun incorporating the Easter Story into our homeschool activities this week! Here are a few learning activities that we did in addition to our Holy Week activities.
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| Our Roadmap to Easter |
1. Reading:
We got out our basket of our favorite Easter stories so that we have them available to read all week. We enjoy reading our stories about Holy Week and also Easter so our children learn and understand what we are getting ready to celebrate starting on Easter Sunday!
I also keep some Lent/Easter lacing sheets that I made in our book basket so that the kids can keep their hands busy during story time if they are getting antsy.
Some of our Favorites include:
This year we did the Holy Week in Handprints from Catholic Icing. It is such a great way to incorporate fun art into Holy Week and Easter story! We were going to do a book for each of our children, but ended up doing one book for the family. It is really sweet to see everyone having different special pages and working together on some pages (I did all of the little finishing touches)! I plan on laminating each of the pages and binding it so we can keep it as a special keepsake for our family.
I would have pictures of us making the pages, but with three kids 5 years old and under there was a lot of painted hands and lots of baby wipes being used so those little hands didn't paint the walls instead of paper! Also because of this we did all of the pages all at once during the beginning of the week instead of doing them on each of the different days. I liked doing it this way as well because then we had the book to read throughout the week. They loved seeing who's hands/feet/fingerprints were on each different day (I wrote this on the back of each page so we do not forget)!
Here are our finished products:
We love all of the Nursery Rhyme Songs that This Reading Momma converted into popular Christian stories. This song to the tune of "Jack and Jill" is a great one to talk to little kids about Jesus dying at Calvary and the Resurrection.
We watched The Easter Story movie, which is a great movie that discusses the truths of the Passion of Christ in a child friendly way, including the Crucifixion.
4. Preschool/Kindergarten Skills:
We used the Resurrection Workbook packs from 3Dinasours.com throughout the week to work on Fine Motor Skills, Matching, Shapes, Puzzles, Letters and more learning fun. This was a pack that I had laminated, labeled and saved away so it was really easy to pull it out to learn about Easter!
5. Science:
We did The Easter Story Nature Walk and Scavenger Hunt for our science learning this week. It was a fun way to look around nature to find different things, smells and sights that remind and teach us about the Easter Story. It's been a beautiful week of weather this week so it was great to be outside! We were able to complete this activity at the Holy Family Shrine near us and we found things that were thorny, things that were dead or alive, we walked up a hill, found a rock, counted birds and did art rubbings of leaves.
We did an activity where we talked about how Jesus carried the cross even though it was very heavy. We tried to carry heavy things (we have a wooden beam that we use in our homeschool room) and saw how long it took for us to get tired. We then talked about how Simon helped Jesus carry his cross and how we can help each other when things are tough in our lives. We allowed the kids to help each other carry objects and also see how much easier it made it when they helped!
Then our oldest son decided that their wooden beam was not really a cross and on his own ran out to our backyard wood pile to find some wood. He came inside and asked if we could make a real cross. He was so sweet and decided we had to put nails on the sides and at the bottom just like Jesus had on his cross and he felt this was much more realistic to use. Of course, what was I thinking! After we were done with the activity he brought it upstairs to include it with our Lenten/Easter decorations!
We prayed the Stations of the Cross a few times this week and continued many of our other interactive activities during Holy Week to learn about the entire story of the Passion of Christ. We also were able to go to an Interactive Stations of the Cross at our Parish Church that was led by the youth group. They did a wonderful job!
We also went to look at the Stations of the Cross at the Holy Family Shrine which is near our home. This is also where we did our nature Scavenger hunt!
We have also been doing a lot of playing with our Passion Week Peg Dolls. Our boys have been playing with them in our Melissa and Doug Castle that we store our Peg Dolls in. Our oldest son said that the Castle is Heaven and had St Peter standing on top of the gates with his keys to Heaven. I love how you realize how many Bible Stories and lives of Saints that they know when they interact with these dolls! We also have been using the Passion Week Peg Dolls a lot during Story Time and Stations of the Cross to act out what we are hearing! They are such a great addition to our home to help bring the Easter Story to life.
I hope you all have a Blessed Holy Week and a fun time incorporating the Easter Story into fun learning!
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