Our Second Week of Advent - 2015

 

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Feast of St. Nicholas

 

We had a wonderful time celebrating the Feast of St. Nicholas.  Read more about it HERE!

 

 

 

My favorite moment later in the day was when our oldest had carried our baby (one month) over to a chair near the nativity and Jesse Tree and said ""This, Peter is called a Jesse Tree, and this ornament is the Earth. God made it, just like he made you. I will teach you about everything buddy. You are my favorite person."

 

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The Living Nativity

Our parish church has a living nativity each year and it is such a simple yet beautiful thing to see.  It was a fun activity to bring the children out past their bedtime to witness a live example of such a beautiful story!

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A Small Miracle

We continued with our Christmas Mosaic books this week and the first one for this week was A Small Miracle.  I really loved this book and how it has NO WORDS and only story board images telling the story!!  Christmas Mosaic has a narration that you can use with each image, but it was really great to let my children narrate the story from what they saw on the pictures!

 

In the story the nativity at the town church is vandalized and the old women helps to set it back up.  Then the characters from the nativity help the old women when she is in need.  We took time to narrate the story using manipulatives from our own nativity sets.  I love how Catechesis of the Good Shepard has taught our children to quietly explore and take things in.  Our 2 1/2 year old has been taking the tiny baby Jesus from the Playmobil Nativity that they received on the Feast of St Nicholas around with him everywhere!

 

 We then drew our own images of the story and images to make up stories of our own. 

 

Our 4 year old loves crafts so later when the little guys were napping he and I made this fun Stained Glass Nativity.  He was so proud with how it turned out!

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Immaculate Conception

Celebrating the Feast of the Immaculate Conception was filled with a lot of small things to help us grow in prayer and understanding of Mary.  First, we went to mass, and this was a big accomplishment since it was the first time that I took all four children to mass alone.  My husband has been doing an AMAZING job putting our kids what we call "Daddy boot camp" at mass once we expect them to sit along and follow during mass.  He has "trained" our first two children and it helps so much for them to have significantly improved behavior when I am have them all in mass by myself.  I look forward to the time when our current 2 year old goes through "Daddy boot camp" because he is still a little "difficult" at mass!

Once we were home we hung up our Immaculate Conception ornament from Catholic Icing onto our Advent tree.  I love this ornament because it truly shows the image of Mary within St. Anne's womb and really helps the little ones understand what we are celebrating!   We read Mary, Mother of Jesus by Tomie dePaola and then finally made an art project of the Miraculous Medal from the Seton 1 Art book while we listened to Immaculate Mary by Marian Grace!

Our sons had also decorated our Mary which sits outside of our home with Christmas lights the night prior to her Feast Day so that she would "Shine for everyone to see"!

 

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Feast of Juan Diego and Our Lady of Guadalupe

We love the all of the Saint Feast Days during Advent and have so much fun celebrating each of them in little ways!  We celebrated the Feast of Juan Diego for the first time in our family last year and had a blast.  This year we took our ornaments from Catholic Icing and hung them on our Advent Tree, read The Lady of Guadalupe by Tomie dePaola, and watched Juan Diego: Messenger of Guadalupe by CCC of America.  We also had tacos for lunch to keep it fun and simple!

 

 

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The Clown of God

We love the book The Clown of God by Tomie dePaola!  Our son Connor had received this book when we celebrated his Saint Feast Name Day this summer and we have loved it ever since.  Since it is included in Catholic Mosaic during Advent we thought it would be a great time to apply it to our school work and we had a blast.  Amazingly we are having BEAUTIFUL weather in December so we read the book outside and practiced juggling just like the main character in the book!

We then did the copy work to practice handwriting of a beautiful line from the book:

"If you give happiness to people, you give glory to God as well."

 

And then because it was such a lovely day we continued all of our school work for the day outside!  Thank you God for the beautiful sunshine to enjoy!

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CHC - Who am I Series?

When our oldest son had finished Seton's Kindergarten Religion/Catechism curriculum I was looking for something else that I could work on with our oldest two children together.  Someone directed me to the CHC Who am I Series and explained that I could merge the Pre-School and Kindergarten books together.  We have been working on these books for a few months together and are really loving them.  They explain difficult concepts in easy ways for little ones to understand and grasp and have fun activities and crafts to do as well!  We love that they have extra chapters for each week of Advent to help our deepen our learning during this special time!

 

 

Linking up this week with Like Mother, Like Daughter and This Ain't The Lyceum!