Egg Carton Advent Wreath Craft

My daughter's Catholic school has been having half days for parent-teacher conferences.  Since I work, this means my daughter has been going to their quality after school program. 

They had an arts and crafts day, and she came home with this adorable little advent wreath.

It is four sections of egg carton cut off, four birthday cake candles poked into the egg carton centers, pink and purple ribbons tied to the candles and some greenery spread around the top.

This seems like it would be a great craft that is simple enough for the K-1 students, but interesting enough for older students (my 4th grader liked it!).  I can't wait to try this with my class this Advent season.

Giving Back- our family's holiday giving plans

Our family has a favorite "pet" charity in our hometown, the Hope House .  Hope House is a small organization, run out of an old rectory on one of our town's Catholic Churches.   It is a simple "business" plan, they take in donations from parishioners and community members, and distribute the items during certain hours, allowing individuals to "shop" for free for what they need.  This includes clothing, household goods, and basic toiletries and food.

My daughter and I started volunteering at the Hope House after driving by it each day and first becoming donors, purchasing items on their "most needed" list on their outside whiteboard.  We eventually started volunteering one Saturday a month, sorting and organizing goods.  This past Friday, we were back at Hope House sorting, and my little girl made it three straight hours sorting out the books and toys...I'm so proud of her.

So this year, for the holidays, we are adopting a family identified by Hope House for Christmas.  We will get to purchase gifts for another father, mother and a five year old girl, and I'm looking forward to letting my daughter be involved heavily in the process to help keep her focus off of only"what I want from Santa."

Through my employer, we also "adopt" the children of parents in one of the Drug Courts, and will be able to provide them with small gifts, and a party with Santa to allow the parents and children some special and happy time together (many of the kids are still in foster or relative care while their parents work on chemical dependency issues).

I'm looking forward to the shopping, wrapping and praying for the recipients of our gifts, and hope that they are able to see the love of Christ through our anonymous actions.

What are you doing this year to "give back" with your kids and set the giving back example?

2nd Week of Advent- "Waiting" Collages

Due to the Thanksgiving break, this was our first class during Advent this year.

We started out our circle time discussing the color change in the church, from green to purple, using our liturgical colors mat in the center. We then discussed times we had waited for something, for a new baby brother or sister, a new toy, a birthday, or a holiday, such as Christmas.

We told the story of the birth of Jesus from one of the children's books in our classroom, and discussed what it might have been like for Mary and Joseph to be waiting and preparing for baby Jesus.

We then turned the kids loose with a large sheet of construction paper, and many magazines. Their task was to cut out things that they had to wait for, and we again discussed Advent, and the use of "purple" in the church as a color of waiting and preparation.

3rd Sunday of Advent- Nativity Coloring Book

We've been snowed out! Unfortunately, RE was cancelled. However, I will post what we would have done, had their been a class today. I don't know how it would have been received, but my guess is that it would have been received well given past experiences with similar projects.

Since this is the Third Sunday of Advent, we would have reviewed our prior projects from the past few weeks (the wreath and the Jesse tree) and asked the kids to discuss the colors in the church (purple/pink) the number of candles lighted on the wreath and any nativity sightings they have seen- the idea is to get excited about the upcoming birthday of Jesus.

At home, we have a couple of nativity scenes- one is a beautiful, hand made ceramic set made by my grandmother (now deceased). We set this up w/o baby Jesus, on the first Sunday of Advent, and add Jesus on Christmas morning (or afternoon as soon as we get home from our holiday travels). This nativity is special, and one that is "look only" in our house. Unwrapping it each year has become a fun tradition.

Our other Nativity scenes include a Little People Nativity. I love this product, as it is perfect for playing, in a very respectful way. We have this set up, but the figures make the journey from around the house to the stable, arriving on Christmas day (we help the figures get closer each night). This is a great discussion prompter at night.

Finally, we have a nativity waterball that sits on our table near our advent wreath- a nice reminder of what we are waiting and anticipating during advent.

Back to the lesson... after discussion, we would have created Advent coloring books. My husband found coloring sheets online, already set up for this purpose. We would have added purple construction paper covers to end up with a nice project to take home and review as we wait for Christmas.

Here is the site for the coloring book: http://www.dltk-bible.com/advent/index.htm

One more week!

Second Week of Advent- Jesse Tree

This was a crazy weekend, as this was our annual "Craft Fair" weekend with my sister and mom, so I was busy all morning Saturday selling our wares our local craft fair for kids to shop at for their parents and family. I also was signed up to serve as a Lector at the 5:00 p.m. Saturday Mass, so this week it was up to my husband to come up with the Lesson plan.

He researched Advent, and decided to teach about the Jesse Tree, and to make a Jesse Tree in our class. The story behind the Jesse Tree can be found at http://www.catholicculture.org/culture/liturgicalyear/activities/view.cfm?id=545 and http://www.cresourcei.org/jesse.html

Basically, this is a tree that traces bible stories back from Jesus back to the Old Testament. It has great references back to bible stories and bible verses, which I personally like as a Protestant convert. The trees provide great discussion points for during advent, and a great opportunity to crack open the Bible with the kids at home.

We used half sheets of white posterboard, one for each child. We printed off the symbols from the OSV website: http://www.osv.com/Portals/0/images/pdf/JesseTree.pdf. We then reduced them on the copy machine at 80%, which made them still easy enough to color, but small enough so that they could all fit on the half sheet of posterboard. On each sheet of posterboard, we drew a line down the middle (long-way) and parallel lines across the middle line in the shape of the tree.

In class, we had the kids color all of the symbols, and cut them out (words/bible references included in the cutout shapes). The kids then attached the symbols with glue sticks, starting with the Jesus symbol at the top, and the Mary and Joseph (the carpenter) symbols slightly lower and next to Jesus. The rest we let the kids put on the "trees" in any order.

These turned out pretty cute, and hopefully a valuable conversation starter at home during advent. We sent home information about the Jesse Tree for those parents who might not have seen one before (I hadn't).

This class was a success, but it took nearly our entire hour-- no time for our traditional circle time. We just did our explaining as the kids worked.

First Week of Advent- Advent Wreaths

Today we celebrated the first week of Advent with our K-1 class. We used our circle time to discuss what Advent means, a time of waiting in the church for Jesus's birthday. We discussed the changes in the church- the colors (purple) the evergreens and the Advent Wreath.

We explained the symbolism of the different parts of the wreath-- why there are pink and purple candles, why the wreath is round, why evergreens are used, etc. A great reference on Advent Wreaths and their history and can be found at: http://www.catholiceducation.org/articles/religion/re0132.html . This background was helpful in reviewing the parts of the wreaths we were going to make with our kids.

Additionally, we shared the information from http://catholicism.about.com/od/adventactivities/p/Advent_Wreath.htm with our parents, as it provides more instructions on what to do with the wreaths as a family at home.

For our craft, we purchased the Advent Wreath Making kits available on Oriental Trading Company. Real greenery would have been better, but I live on a treeless lot, so this wasn't really an option. The foam wreaths can be found at: http://www.orientaltrading.com/ui/browse/processRequest.do?demandPrefix=12&sku=48/712&mode=Searching&erec=9&D=advent&Ntt=advent&Ntk=all&Dx=mode%2bmatchallpartial&Ntx=mode%2bmatchallpartial&N=0&requestURI=processProductsCatalog&sd=Advent+Table+Wreath+Craft+Kit

You can get 12 kits for less than nine dollars, and they are pretty nice, with wooden candles.

This wreath kit was actually pretty doable for our age group (youngest is 4, oldest is 7). It is primarily a gluing project, elmer's glue or a similar type of fluid glue will work best. Our one tip from going through this project-- the wreath forms that come with the project are floppy and thin to start with, and when combined with glue, made it impossible to carry home. We made due by ripping up some cardboard boxes in the room and sending them home on the pieces of carboard, but in the future, we will plan ahead with precut cardboard, perhaps covered with a purple piece of paper, so that it looks nicer and we don't need to worry about floppy wreaths and glue overuse...

We sent the kids home with handouts based on some of the information we had researched above. All in all, a positive class.