Guardian Angel Craft

   Our lesson this past Sunday focused on Angels, and guardian angels and the Prayer to One's Guardian Angel.

 

For our craft, we created the above angels.  This project involved a lot of out of class prep and not a lot of in class activity.

 

We spray painted toilet paper rolls gold, and painted 2 inch Styrofoam balls (the smooth kind) peach before class.  We also pre-cut large gold ribbon, tying a small piece of yarn in the middle of the piece of ribbon to gather the angel wings.  For the angel's hair, we gathered metallic yarn.

 

In class we had the kids draw on the angel face with a permanent marker.  We then assisted in hot gluing the pre made angel pieces together.  The kids really loved this project-- it didn't take a lot of class time, but gave them something really nice to take home to their home altars.

 

For our lesson, we discussed angels in depth using our text book.  I also purchased a new book on the internet, Angels for Kids, which provided a lot of information and answers to questions about angels.

While the kids were waiting for assistance with the glue, we had them work on writing out their Guardian Angel prayer.  I purchased a downloadable book, Learning Our Prayers the Write Way which has the kids trace the prayer then write it on their own. The entire book download is only $2.00, and includes permission to share the materials with your whole RE class.  There were several prayers in the book, I just used the Guardian angel prayer but look forward to using other prayers in future lessons.

Juggling: Gymnastics and a repeat lesson on Heaven

This weekend presented a challenge- our daughter had her first ever gymnastics meet scheduled for the same day as our RE class. 

My husband, 9 year old daughter and I usually team-teach the class, which has this year amounted to 16-18 Kindergartner and first graders each week.

My husband decided to brave the class alone, while my daughter and I headed out early to her first meet.

The next lesson in our text book was on Heaven.  To keep things simple, we decided to go with a tried and true craft, previously featured on this blog, where kids make their own "heaven" sculpture out of cotton balls.

To the left is our angel and heaven craft and you can link to the original post here.  My husband reports that although he had about 16 students in attendance, he was able to successfully get the kids through the book lesson, circle time and this craft. 

 

In related news, my daughter placed 7th in both the Vault and Floor.  Pretty exciting!   I hope you all have a blessed week and will pray for all of the parents out there juggling parenting, work and our commitments to our Church. 

 

What is Heaven Like?

We get this question a lot, and like many the children pose, we don't have an exact answer. In our circle time, we had them close their eyes and imagine what heaven was like and who they might see in heaven.

For our craft, we had the kids create their version of heaven. For supplies, we gave them small clear plastic plates (from the dollar store, ours were about 4-5 inches in diameter, cotton balls, and made copies of an angel and star shape (some free ones from the internet are here, I used some from an old teacher's book that I had and that is what is pictured here.

Most kids made one layer of cotton balls with their angel and star, as you can see from the photo, my daughter went a little crazy and put lots of cotton balls on hers (but hey, who am I to say what heaven will look like?!)

We used elmer's glue on plates and had the kids dip in the cotton balls to minimize the mess. We used about three bags of cotton balls for a class of 13 kids. This worked well for all of our kids (4-7 years) as the younger kids didn't need to read or cut out a lot, and the older kids like anything to do with glue and any non-paper materials.