Saint Francis of Assisi

I haven't posted much about Sunday School lately. We did sock puppets for the story of The Flight into Egypt (one class session to make the puppets and one week to present the story), then we did the main lesson book page and the wool pictures for the next week's class. One student brought in all the girls from her birthday slumber party to class and that was -- luckily -- the week we put on the puppet show. So that gave us a good audience.

The story of The Flight into Egypt I took from an older book called Beautiful Bible Stories. After I told it we made a brainstorm of the characters and each child made a sock puppet for each hand. It ended up working out perfectly -- God, an angel, Mary, Joseph, baby Jesus, 3 wise men, Herod, Herod's son, and Herod's 2 advisors. The sock puppet making was a bit of a toss-off idea but it was a great way to get them to really understand the story, plus making them was a ton of fun. I just handed them each 2 plain white socks and threw open the doors to the supply cabinet. Surprisingly, safety pins turned out to be the most useful supply. And the children had never made them before.

So (I can't remember if I already wrote about all of that, if I did, sorry) now we are doing a series to follow along with the pastor's sermons on the Five Practices of Fruitful Congregations. I am using these as a chance to work in some Saint Stories! The one we did last week was "Passionate Worship" for which I told the story of Simeon the Stylite (and Daniel the Stylite). I used the book A Calendar of Saints: The Lives of the Principal Saints of the Christian Year for this.

This week the theme was "Intentional Faith Development." I chose Saint Francis of Assisi for this. Resources used included Saints: A Year in Faith and Art, One Hundred Saints: Their Lives and Likenesses Drawn from Butler's , and Stories of the Saints by Siegwart Knijpenga (available through Bob & Nancy's Bookshop). I told the story of his birth, of his vision and his subsequent devotion to poverty, and his sermon to the birds. We used the picture of Francis preaching to the birds in Magic Wool: Creative Activities With Natural Sheep's Wool to inspire paper collages of the same scene. The scene will be all paper with one exception: we are using burlap for Francis's robe. The children actually had a lot of prior knowledge of Saint Francis since he is featured in garden statues and bird baths and bird feeders and so on. Next week we are going to finish the collages, make pinecone bird feeders (with peanut butter and birdseed) and move on to the next saint story. Next week is "Risk-taking Mission and Service" and we will do Saint Christopher, one of my favorites. My favorite version is One Dark and Stormy Night: Legend of Saint Christopher. It's drawn as a cartoon book but the story is wonderful and I'm not reading it anyway, I'm telling it. So as far as I'm concerned, whatever helps the storyteller learn the story is fine.

In home life, we have been hanging out and having fun. 2 snow days off from school this week meant playing outside, feeding birds, folding laundry together, cooking (we made a delicious cranberry applesauce), breaking out the board games, etc. Now this is my weekend with the kids and we went to a family birthday party yesterday. It is so nice to have a party actually fall on a weekend when I can go to it! Leah and I planted some wheatgrass seeds for her guinea pig and now Becca and I are doing a Grass Seed Kit from Smith & Hawken (which was on clearance from Target) of Ryegrass, Catgrass, and Lovegrass. This is the time of year when you just want to PLANT things!

For the Tidewater vegetable garden I got yukon gold seed potatoes (hoeing is such good work for children) as well as buttercrunch lettuce, broccoli, swiss chard (which grew beautifully in our garden last year), carrots, radishes, small sugar pumpkins, black beauty eggplant, and sugar baby watermelon. All the seeds are organic. We will do Farming & Gardening in March, which I want to tie in with Linear Measurement (including finding Area) and a Health unit on the parts of the body and Nutrition and the food groups and so on.

February I am focusing on a fairy tales unit (complete with needle felting and puppetry) and a Physics unit on Sound (which I am getting from a book called 175 More Science Experiments to Amuse and Amaze Your Friends. The entire first section is on Sound and the focus is making musical instruments.