Happy Birthday Mother Mary!

Our children have come to know that September 8th, the Feast of the Nativity of the Blessed Virgin means that we have cake!  I love these little traditions that we are creating within our domestic church and hope that when our children are all grown that memories of these special feast days remain dear to them.  Sometimes the most simple celebrations are the best.  Our day consisted of cuddles on the couch reading sweet stories of Mary, singing Mary "Happy Birthday" and enjoying an afternoon snack of cake! 

 

Celebrating the Canonization of St. Teresa of Calcutta

 

On September 4th, 2016 Mother Teresa of Calcutta was canonized as a Saint within the Catholic Church.  It is so wonderful to see a modern day Saint and be able to learn about how they changed the world.  As we prepared for her canonization and then first feast day as a Saint on September 5th, we did a lot of learning about St. Teresa within our domestic church. 

We always listen to Holy Heroes Glory Stories, but this new one about Saint Teresa of Calcutta is wonderfully made.  Everyone in our family loved the story and we all learned so much!  We also read some great books including Mother Teresa by Demi, and a few other great selections from the library.

We always try to display Saints who we are learning about and celebrating within our home as constant reminders to our family of these great individuals.  I found a beautiful St. Mother Teresa from Naturally Catholic.  It is stunning and makes me want to get many other wonderful items from her store! 

 

Also, I don't often take the time to enter giveaways, but I decided to try on this amazing giveaway in celebration of the canonization of St. Teresa of Calcutta and guess what...I WON!!!  I was seriously giddy when I found out and it has been like Christmas seeing these beautiful items arrive one by one in the mail!  Thank you so much to all of the amazing people who contributed.  I will definitely be talking more about their amazing stores in the future and am so excited to display some of these wonderful pieces around our home.

 

 

Saint Teresa of Calcutta, pray for us!

The Ink Garden of Brother Theophane

 

This week with our Memoria Press Enrichment activities we read The Ink Garden of Brother Theophane. The story is all about monks in Ireland who are trying to copy the Bible in brown ink and Brother Theophane who figures out that he could use other plants and berries to make ink other colors.  The illustrations in this book are simply beautiful and we had SO much fun expanding our learning based off of this book.

 

Although Memoria Press's Enrichment Guide gives us lots of ideas of what to do I love when our children find their own activities that they want to do based off of stories that we read.  In one part of the book Brother Theophane was getting distracted while doing his work and was throwing bread crumbs to the birds.  Our two oldest boys immediately thought it would be fun to throw and leave out bread crumbs for the birds (I think they ended up actually being eaten by our dogs though!)

 

One activity that the book suggested was going to visit a Monastery.  I sadly did not even know if we had a Monastery in Omaha, but after a quick Google search I found the Poor Clare Sisters of Omaha.  I gave them a call, told them that we were a homeschooling family in town and we were wondering if we could come get a tour!  They gladly told us to come by whenever and were incredibly welcoming and kind. 

 

We had just studied St. Clare on her feast day which was August 11th, and also often talk about St. Clare when we learn about one of our favorite saints St. Francis who also lived in Assisi and was a teacher to St. Clare.  In their chapel they have a beautiful mural of St. Francis blessing St. Clare.  We also took the time to look around and find all of the important objects around the chapel, just like when we toured the Cathedral a few weeks ago.  This really helps our children understand the universality of the Catholic Church!

 

 

They also told us the AMAZING story of when Mother Teresa came to Omaha in 1976 to receive the Father Flanagan Award for Service to Youth at Boys Town.  When she was in Omaha to receive the award she visited and stayed overnight with the Sisters of St. Clare.  One of the nuns who was a part of their community during that time is still living and is still a part of the monastery today!  With the canonization of Mother Teresa coming up on Sunday September 4th, 2016 this was really wonderful to hear about and see pictures of.  The wonderful Sisters gave each of us handmade rosaries as we left.  We had a wonderful afternoon learning more about their mission and work.

 

Mother Teresa with the Sisters of St. Clare

Mother Teresa at Boys Town

 

Next, we knew that we wanted to make our own ink like Brother Theophane in the story with bright colors so we decided to go pick some of our own berries!  After morning mass we headed down to a local berry farm to pick raspberries and we had so much fun. 

The recipe is also in this awesome activity guide for the story!

After picking raspberries together we spent the rest of the morning exploring and playing together at the berry farm.  It was one of those rare days when everyone was getting along, in good moods and was a great morning to hang out together.  I watched all of our boys laughing and playing together and had to hold back tears as I realized that we would miss these moments of all being together and learning together if we did not have the ability to homeschool.  I am so thankful to God for giving me grace and patience to homeschool our children during this phase of our life.  I know that our moments and days are far from perfect, but I feel so honored to not miss these moments.  I treasure being able to watch them explore, learn and laugh together and am so humbled and honored to have these years with them.

After we had all of our raspberries the next day we made the ink and painted, just like Brother Theophane!  This was such a simple and such a fun activity.  All you need is berries, vinegar and salt! (Here is the recipe!)

After painting we read our poetry for the week which was Fireflies in the book Animals, Animals by Eric Carle.  We had never really exposed our children to poetry before and so these fun little poems provide a great introduction.

 

We finished up our week studying the song Sheep May Safely Graze by Bach and also the painting Titus as a Monk by Rembrant.  We had such a fun week and are really loving these enrichment activities to go along with such wonderful literature!

 

 

 

Celebrating St. John the Baptist with a House Full of Boys

We love to take time during a Saint's feast day to talk about interesting facts about the saint and also try to learn something new.  This weekend as we were approaching the feast day of the martyrdom of St. John the Baptist (which is on August 29th) I asked our boys what something interesting about St. John the Baptist was.  St. John the Baptist is a saint that our children know quite a bit about, so I was interested to hear what stories they would tell.

I was imagining that they would bring up the story of The Visitation when Mary visited Elizabeth and how John the Baptist leapt in the womb knowing that Jesus was present within Mary (Luke 1:41).  Or maybe the great story of how John the Baptist baptized Jesus in the river Jordan (Matthew 3:13-17). 


St John the Baptist


Nope!  When I asked my crew of little boys an interesting fact about St. John the Baptist our 6 year old said "He was BEHEADED!!!"  He continued on re-telling the entire story of John the Baptist's beheading.



St John the Baptist

 

I just laughed, somewhat proud that they remember facts, but in also realizing how different little boys minds work!  In the end, the most important thing is that they are learning and interested!

St. John the Baptist, pray for us. 



A Visitor For Bear

Anyone who knows our family or who has followed our blog knows that our family LOVES to read books.  Our kids have naturally learned how to read pretty early and from then on dive into book after book.  We love read aloud time and even our little ones have their very favorite books that we read over and over again.  We have used the programs Before Five in a Row and Five in a Row in the years past (check out our homeschool page to see some examples of what we have done with these programs) which are literary based programs that we adore.  I knew I could repeat them, and was sure we would all gain something new, but I also knew that there must be something out there to bring more great literature to our family.

After asking some veteran homeschool moms I learned about Memoria Press's literature guides and enrichment programs.  These programs take wonderful literature and dive deep into comprehension and also applying other correlating subjects (art, science, poetry, music, etc) to these great stories.  They have these programs for each grade level but I knew that I wanted to teach our children together.  Our 6 year old is doing mostly second grade material but should "technically" be in 1st grade this year and our 4 1/2 year old is doing mostly kindergarten - 1st grade material but should "technically" be in pre-school this year.  After guessing what might work best for our family I choose the 1st grade curriculum for us all to use together and after only our first week I am pretty confident it will be a fantastic fit for us for this year! 

This week we read the story A Visitor for Bear by Bonnie Becker.  Memoria Press's Enrichment Guide gives great questions to ask to really look at the book in depth starting before you even read the first page.  Looking at the Title, Author, Illustrator and figuring out what you can learn about the story before you even begin.  Once you read the story it helps go through new vocabulary and has a fantastic list of questions to ask for comprehension.

The next part of the Enrichment Guide takes a theme from the story and enhances it with different subjects (art, poetry, music, science, etc).  In the story A Visitor for Bear the Bear is trying to make himself breakfast with tea when the mouse continues to interrupt him.  By the end of the story the Bear and the Mouse become dear friends and end having a tea party together.  This week enhanced our learning by studying the history of tea by reading The Biography of Tea, learning table etiquette during a tea party and other times, famous artwork including tea time (Five O'clock Tea by Mary Cassatt), and poetry from A Children's Book of Poems, all while listening to and studying the famous Pie Jesu!  We also had our very own tea party, which was wonderful to practice our etiquette skills and for our oldest son to practice his kitchen skills of learning how to turn on the stove and prepare food and drink.

Plus, since we had never been introduced to the author Bonny Becker before and quickly fell in love with the characters we checked out some more of her books to read during evening story time!  We read A Bedtime for Bear, A Birthday for Bear and The Sniffles for Bear and loved them all!

 

We all had such a wonderful time and I know that the children would not even think that this was a part of "school time".  I am so excited for what is to come for next week and cannot wait to share it all with our children and all of you!