Creating a Special Prayer Space for Children

 

 

As our oldest son is preparing for his sacraments of First Reconciliation and First Communion, one thing that we wanted to teach him is how to build and increase his own personal prayer life.  We wanted to help him create a special prayer place just for himself.  We have a Little Oratory in our home where we will join to pray as a family or where individual people in our family will often go for some quiet time, but we wanted a place that would be his own! 

 

He shares his bedroom with one of his brothers and they have a set of bunk beds where our oldest son sleeps on the top bed.  We put up shelves where he can keep books that he is reading and then near the head of his bed we have hung a cross for St. Matthew (his patron saint) and a small Crucifix that he was allowed to pick out all on his own!  Also, on his baptism anniversary we gave him the gift of a pillow with the St. Michael prayer, which he loves.  He also has his prayer book that he made with Preparing to Receive Jesus from CHC hanging on a little hook so that he made use it to help aid in his personal prayer time. 

This prayer book is such a beautiful and simple way for children to learn about and personalize their prayer time.  First he learned about praying with "ACTS" standing for "Adoration, Contrition, Thanksgiving and Supplication".  The Preparing to Receive Jesus curriculum gave a great template of what to pray and then our son was able to pick Holy Cards to glue to each page to personalize his prayer book even more.  Once he was done arranging his Holy Cards and pages I helped to laminate his book and put on a ring holder to keep it together!  He especially loves the pages in which he was able to include photographs of our family and of his favorite saints (he picked St. Michael and St. Jerome!)  I hope that his prayer life continues to grow over the course of this next year as he is preparing to receive two very important sacraments.

 

Also be sure to check out our Tour of the Church which we also completed with our Sacramental Preparations!

Feast of Our Guardian Angels

 

 

On October 2nd, we celebrate the Feast of Our Guardian Angels.  I think that it is so important for us to understand this special gift that we all have a Guardian Angel.  A tradition that we have done for the past 3 years is on this day we have a tea party with our Guardian Angels!  We set out tea cups not only for ourselves but also for our guardian angels.  I think this really helps our children understand that we can and should talk to our guardian angels just like our other family members and friends.  Although we can not see our Guardian Angels we should know and trust that they are always here for us to protect and guide us. 

 

At our tea party we also read the book My Guardian Dear which is a wonderful story all about our Guardian Angels.  The story is wonderful and the images are breath taking.  Our children really loved the image of all of the angels sitting by every person at Mass.  Thank you God for giving each of us the gift of a Guardian Angel to be with us.

Also, our monthly art piece to study with Art Masterpieces with CHC is about Angels for the Month of October!

 

 

As a blast from the past, here is our Guardian Angel tea party from 2 years ago in 2014.  Our kids love this tradition and it is also so much fun to see how they have all grown and changed over the years.  We also made a simple angel craft that year during our celebration of the feast day!

 

Feast of St. Jerome

 

Each year we try to learn about a few Saints who are new to our family.  This year one of those Saints is St. Jerome, whose feast day we celebrate on September 30th and who is the Patron Saint of Librarians.  We love the story St. Jerome and the Lion by Margaret Hodges that beautifully tells a story of St. Jerome and his history of living in Bethlehem and translating the Bible into Latin.  We also have a little statue of St. Jerome that hangs at the entrance of our own home library.

 

As we have continued homeschooling and our little ones have learned how to read our love of books continues to grow.  We typically visit the city library once a week and also love to find all of the Free Little Libraries around town!  This summer we even collected all of our books (and lots of books that my and my husband's parents had collected over the years) to make our own home library.  Once our home library was made our oldest son Ryan fell in love with being our "librarian".  Every day he collects the books that he and his brothers have read, sorts them, re-shelves them and then sits down to read, read and read some more!

 

 

Over the past handful of months, one thing that we have been trying to do as a family is discover and explore all of the different public libraries in our city.  It is so much fun to see what different fun things that they all have to do, and also use our library skills to know how to find different kinds of books at new places!  We also have our children learn that when they are not sure how to find a book that they are looking for that they need to approach the librarian on their own to talk to him or her and ask the proper questions.  We have had so much fun and have explored seven different branches of our city library so far!

 

St. Jerome, patron saint of Librarians, pray for us!

Feast of Michaelmas

Nothing could top our amazing Liturgical Playdate that we had last year for the Feast of the Archangels, but we still had fun celebrating St. Michael, St. Gabriel and St. Raphael this year!  We went to daily mass and then had an amazing morning with friends at the local pumpkin patch! 

After dinner we read some of our favorite stories about angels.  We prayed the St. Michael prayer together and had Angel Food Cake with Blackberries for dessert. 


Catholic All Year

Lyle, Lyle Crocodile

 

We had kind of a crazy week of not only my husband being out of town but also of illness cycling through all of the kids!  Thankfully, even when sick we can all cuddle up and read!  We didn't do much more than that this week, but that is one thing that I simply adore about homeschooling.  It truly allows us to be flexible and go with the flow of life!  This week we focused on the book Lyle, Lyle Crocodile by Bernard Waber.  We LOVE Lyle books at our house and have many of them so we also read The House of East 88th Street, and Lyle and the Birthday Party.

 

We continued by learning more about crocodiles reading Alligators and Crocodiles by Gail Gibbons and Miles and Miles of Reptiles by Dr. Suess!  Also in the story Signor Valenti was going to bring Lyle to Australia to be a performer so we read the story  about Australia and Oceania!  We were going to take a trip to the zoo to check out the crocodiles and other animals from Australia, but again with all of the illnesses in our house that can wait for a later time!  We still had a lot of fun learning right from our couch together.

 

We also read the poem "The Crocodile" by Lewis Carroll in the book A Child's Book of Poems and studied the painting Children's Games by Pieter Bruegel.  In the story of Lyle, Lyle Crocodile, Lyle loves to play games with all of the children.  It was fun to study this painting and all of the different games that the children were playing.  The image continues over 230 children playing about 90 different games!

We are going to take a few weeks off from Memoria Press's Enrichment Guide because I realized that we are a little bit ahead of their traditional schedule, as the next selection in their book is for Columbus Day in later October.  We are going to dive into some awesome books about Fall and Trees to learn more in the next few weeks!

 

St Matthew's Feast Day

On September 21st we celebrate the feast of St. Matthew.  St Matthew gives us such a great example to follow Jesus and that all are called to follow Jesus, including sinners.

 

 

Matthew 9:9-13

As Jesus passed by, he saw a man named Matthew sitting at the customs post.  He said to him, "Follow me."  And he got up and followed him.  While he was at the table in his house, many tax collectors and sinners came and sat with Jesus and his disciples.  The Pharisees saw this and said to his disciples, "Why does your teacher eat with tax collectors and sinners?"  He heard this and said, "Those who are well do not need a physician, but the sick do.  God and learn the meaning of the words, I desire mercy, not sacrifice. I did not come to call the righteous but sinners".

 

I love so much about this bible passage and always can take a different message away from it.  We are all sinners, and Jesus does not expect us not to be sinners.  Yet, he does expect us to follow Him.  Beyond that, we need to learn to desire mercy, not sacrifice.  What a profound message for all of us to learn to desire mercy.

As always, we like to celebrate the special feast days and since our oldest son's middle name is Matthew we celebrate the feast of St. Matthew.  As our son is preparing for the sacraments of Reconciliation and First Communion this year one thing that we are teaching him is to have more individualized and personalized prayer time.  To do this he has been working hard to create a special prayer place in our home just for him and also making a special prayer book with his favorite prayers and Saints (more on that to come!).  We got him this special St. Matthew cross to add to his special place.

 

St Matthew, pray for us!