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.

"Hoppy" to Know Our Prayers

This year's theme for our K-1 RE class is.....Frogs!

 

As you can see above, we are using a similar bulletin boar to track and recognize our students as they memorize their prayers.  In our local Archdiocese, the students memorize the Sign of the Cross, Prayer Before Meals, Prayer After Meals and Prayer to One's Guardian Angel in Kindergarten.  In First Grade, they memorize the Our Father, Hail Mary, Glory Be and the Prayer at the Stations of the Cross.

 

On our first class, each child created a frog prayer book with their four required prayers, to take home a work on memorizing during the week.  When they come to class, they recite a prayer to a teacher and earn a frog prize and we put their name on a frog and post it to the bulletin board.

 

Free printables for the Lily pads are here , just write in the names of the prayers you are tracking, and the frog prayer books will be posted soon. 



 



 

Ash Wednesday, Lent and Caterpillars

On the last Sunday of Ordinary Time before Ash Wednesday, we presented the topic of Lent and penance and preparation for Easter.

For our introductory activity while the kids arrived, we had them color a simple Ash Wednesday drawing, like the one found on Coloring Pages 101 .

We then went outside and watched an Eagle Scout burn last year's palms to prepare the ashes for Ash Wednesday.

When we returned to our classroom, we had our circle time, working on the Prayer at the Stations of the Cross (1st Grade Prayer to memorize in Seattle Archdiocese) and discussed Ash Wednesday and Lent.

We discussed the process that caterpillars go through to become butterflies.  We encouraged our students to think of ways they could prepare their hearts for Easter during Lent, such as giving up something, doing extra good deeds and adding prayer to their day to day routines.

For our craft project, we made caterpillars out of egg cartons.  For each child, we ripped out a section of three egg cups from old egg cartons, and gave each student two small pieces of pipe cleaner.  The students decorated the caterpillars with markers and inserted the pipe cleaners in the "head" by poking small holes with a pencil first, then inserting the pipe cleaners. 

This ended up being a successful project--easy enough for our preschoolers to complete, but fun enough to keep our 1st graders entertained as well.


Noah's Ark Prayer Flip Books- w/ Free Printables!

We kicked off our first RE class of the year with new and improved prayer flip books, similar to our bumble bee hive books and theme of the previous year.

Our theme this year is Noah's Ark.  Our bulletin board states "We Noah Our Prayers", and is covered in blue butcher paper.  For each student, we created small Noah's Ark boats listing out their required prayers to memorize for their grade level, and have a space at the bottom in a wave for the child's name.  You can find these Prayer Checklist sheets on our Free Printables Page. 

For our class project for the day, we had the children create their own Noah's Ark Prayer Books.  These flip books, similar to our bee hives last year, can be printed, cut out and stacked to make cute booklets containing all of the required prayers.  The flip books can also be found on our Free Printables Page.

Hope you like these...they took awhile to create, but I like the more polished final look that we have this year as opposed to the bee hives last year.

 

Bumble Bee Bulletin Board Prayer Tracking

As promised earlier, here are some photos of our bumble bee themed bulletin board that we are using with our bee hive prayer books to help the kids in our class learn their prayers.

Each child has a bumble bee cut out purchased from our local teaching store, Launching Success.  You can purchase the same bees online at my amazon store here (we saved the matching flowers for a future project, tbd).

Next to the bumble bee, we have the grade level appropriate checklist (included in the bee hive prayer book downloads on that post).

Each time a child gets a prayer correct, we add a bumble bee sticker on the check box (you can see this next to one of the bees here).

As mentioned, we then give them a bee certificate, and a bee themed prize, and will let them choose something from our larger prize box once they memorize and recite all four prayers to us.

Pretty simple, but something fun for memorizing.  We put a copy of our hive prayer books up on the board , along with our attendance chart.

Bumblebee Prayers Prize One

As mentioned in earlier posts, we are using a bumble bee theme in our classroom this year to assist and motivate our K-1 children to memorize the required four prayers for their grade level (Archiocese of Seattle requirements).

When each child is able to successfully recite a prayer to a teacher, we are giving them a small bumblebee certificate (we got ours on the back of an attendance poster from our local teaching store) and a small prize, along with a sticker on their beehive charts, with the goal of four stickers completing the chart resulting in a fun toy prize from our prize box.

For the first prayer the children memorize and recite, we have given them a small bumble bee bookmark that I made prior to class.  When they recited the prayer, I wrote the name of the prayer on their bookmark and gave it to them along with the certificate.  Our plan is to have four different bumble bee prizes to go along with each certificate for prayer memorized.  To stretch this out and allow for us to have enough time to assemble all prizes (or come up with them....I'm still trying to think of a fourth prize) we are only letting them recite one prayer per week.  So far a little over half of our class has recited one prayer.

Here are the instructions and photos for the bookmarks.

 For supplies we purchased Foamies Tounge Depressors (made of craft foam), but a wooden one would also work.  I used two Foamies sticks for each bookmark as they are kind of floppy on their own.  We also purchased large black pom poms, and slightly smaller yellow pom poms, black chenile stems (pipe cleaners) and small googly eyes.

 

To assemble, we first glued the two sticks together to make them sturdier for a bookmark. 

We then used glue to attach the large black pom pom to the sticks. 

Next, we again used glue to attach the smaller yellow pom pom on the center of the black pom pom,

 and finally glued on the eyeballs to the yellow pom pom.

We allowed them to dry.  Once dry, we attached the black chenile stem wings. 

We folded a pipe cleaner in half, and wrapped it around the black part of the bee...

in our picture I show you what it looks like off of the bee for demonstration purposes, but while making them, we formed the wings on the bee body itself.

On the day of class, we wrote the name of the prayer recited on the bookmark with a permanent marker.  Pretty cute!

Beehive Prayer Books

One of our tasks as RE teachers is to ensure our kids learn the required prayers for their grade level.  For Kindergartners, it is the Sign of the Cross, Prayer Before Meals, Prayer After Meals and Prayer to One's Guardian Angel.  For our First Graders, it is Glory Be, Hail Mary, Our Father and the Prayer at the Stations of the Cross.

This year, our class adopted a Bumble Bee theme.  Our attendance poster, purchased from Launching Success Learning Store here in Bellingham, features bumble bees and hives.  On our Bulletin Board, each child has his or her own bumble bee along with a small hive listing the required prayers for their grade (photos to follow in a future post).  A link to these checklists can be found here:  Kindergarten Prayer List Hive and here:  First Grade Prayer List Hive .  Each time a child memorizes a prayer and recites it to one of the teachers, they earn a bumble bee sticker on their hive and a small prize and certificate (bumble bee certificates from the back of our attendance chart).

To help the kids learn their prayers at home, each child assembled a Bumble Bee Hive Prayer Booklet to take home with them.  These are hand drawn by me, so they are not super fancy, bee warned!  You can download copies of the books here:  Kindergarten Bee Hive Prayer Booklet or here:  First Grade Bee Hive Prayer Booklet.

Once you print out the booklets, you can copy them onto yellow or tan paper to make the beehives.  Each child should get one complete set of hive materials.  Have each child cut them out separately, they should end up with five separate pieces.

The pieces then stack from largest on the bottom, to smallest on the top.  The top of the stack can be assembled with a few staples. 

To the Left, you can see a sample of the documents

stacked in progression: 

Our Finished Product....