Summer Faith Adventure--day 5

Today was our last day of Holy Heroes: Summer Faith Adventure. And what a great day for a surprise to arrive in the mail. 4 Holy Hero chef's hats along with a cd of the Summer Faith Adventure songs and a cd of the Joyful mysteries of the Rosary.

The kids were sooo excited and all they did was want to bake!

Today we learned about the Communion of Saints and how, along with the saints in Heaven and the souls in Purgatory, we make up the Communion of Saints and the Catholic church and how we rely on one another on our journey to heaven, and even after we are in heaven.

The snack was fun today,

especailly if you are a hungry nine year old!

Simply add together in a bowl,

goldfish crackers, which represent the "fisher's of men" the apostles.

Animal crackers, symbolizing God's creation.

Pretzel sticks for shephard staffs.

Pretzel twists for praying hands.

Oyster crackers, which represent unleavened bread---which we use for the Eucharist,

and M&M's for the sweetness of life.

Mix together and enjoy!

Today we also learned about the Sacrament of the Annointing of the Sick.

One of our favorite parts of the Summer Faith Adventure has been learning the wonderful new songs. I hope you enjoy hearing the kids singing one of these songs, along with the Holy Heroes Cd as they color today's pictures.

You can check out the past days fun here:

Day 1

Day 2

Day 3

Day 4

I hope you have enjoyed our sharing of the Summer Faith Adventure series. Make sure to check out the Holy Heroes website for lots of great material to help you and your children learn about the saints and the Catholic Faith.

Summer Faith Adventure--day 4

We began today's day-4 of the Holy Heroes Summer Faith Adventure by saying the second decade of the Luminous mystery's of the Holy Rosary--The Wedding Feast at Cana.
I will take this quick opportunity to share this gorgeous rosary that my dear friend Ruth sent to me! It is such a special rosary, I will treasure it forever.

After saying our decade of the rosary, I took this time to read about Jesus' first public miracle in our children's bible. We discussed how Jesus performed this miracle for his mother even though He didn't feel it was time to begin His public life, from this we learned about obedience, especially obedience to your parents.

We then began working on our family tree to remind us of all the people close to us whom we should pray for everyday, even those who have died.
Our family is very large, so we just concentrated on grandparents, aunts, uncles and cousins--and, of course, brothers and sisters.

The Collins' kids have 47 cousins---so we have alot of praying to do---and this is a great way to remind us to keep all this wonderful family in our daily prayers.

Another neat idea from the Holy Heroes kids was to make flowers to put near our family tree. These flowers have the names of our friends,they may not be in our family, but they mean so much to us, we want to pray for them everyday also.

We have a lot more flowers to add, and will do that tomorrow---I believe Gracie is offering everyone "peace" but I am not sure what Kimberly is doing.

I chose to have the kids color the picture of the Wedding Feast at Cana.

We learned that the last recorded words of our Blessed Mother in the Bible took place during the wedding feast. Mary told the servers at the wedding, "Do whatever He tells you." We talked a lot about what the words mean to us---and we know that they mean if we follow Jesus and "do whatever He tells us" we will live forever with Him and Mary in Heaven.

What would a Summer Faith Adventure post be without snacktime! Today was rice krispy treats--to signify that families "stick" together.

I was happy, because today's snack didn't contain the ingredient flour, so I thought it wouldn't be too messy.

We made chocolate rice krispy treats.

Grease the pan--ok--our technique is a little messy.

Mom was in charge of the melted marshmallows and butter--not messy.

Licking out the bowl--okay--this is going to get messy.

And sticky....

really sticky, on hands, faces, tables, hair, clothes, chairs, and the floor,

but they we were, oh, so yummy!!

You can check out:

Day-1 here

Day-2 here

Day-3 here

Summer Faith Adventure--day 3

After a one day hiatus, it was on to day-3 of the Holy Heroes Summer Faith Adventure.

You can check out day-1 here

and day-2 here.

This is how we watch the daily videos featured in the Summer Faith Adventure. Daddy has provided us with a way to hook the laptop to the computer in the dining room. This works great for a lot of our schoolwork. If you aren't familiar with Ten Kids and a Dog, you don't know that the house is pretty small, all 900 square feet of it, so the dining room is used for a schoolroom, for dining in, and for watching tv.

Today's craft was to make a personal prayerbook. Mark and Grace enjoyed this. Holy Heroes provided beautiful printable artwork to add to the books.
Kimberly also wanted to make a prayerbook. She found her own paper, so I knew we were going to make something. So I got out a little Lawrence Lovasik book to use to cut up for pictures. If you don't know about this great bargain, Amazon has many of these books for $1.50 for a 10 PACK of certain titles. It is also offered as a buy 3 get one free, which makes these little books less than .15 cents each. For this price we can afford to cut them up!! It is less money than printing pictures!! (Of course, they also make great gifts. I have packaged up several titles together and sent them all over the country as gifts for little ones.)

Cutting and gluing is one of Kimberly's favorite things.

She has now "read" her prayerbook over and over to anyone who will listen.

Today's snack was homemade pretzels. First we learned about the symbolism of pretzels to the church and then got busy.

There have definitely been a theme to the first three days of the Summer Faith Adventure snack: flour. Fluffy, puffy flour----everywhere, on the table, the floor and the children, but what wonderful memories. I don't generally let the kids get quite soooo involved in the baking process, but this gave us a great opportunity to get messy!

We began with yeast and warm water.

We then kneaded and kneaded and kneaded. I wasn't sure how this overhandled dough would do---but having 12 hands wanting to "work" on the dough didn't hurt anything at all.

Notice the abundance of flour!

Yep, flour is fun--especially paired with a Kool-aid smile.

My 20 year old employed baker had to show the kids how it is really done!

Looking good!

Daddy had to get into the act when Luke decided he wanted to keep his dough to make things with (think playdough), but with Daddy's encouragement, he gave up his dough for one more pretzel

Paint on an egg wash, sprinkle with salt, and we were ready to bake.

The finished product.

Matt had just gotten home from work and was hungry so Kimberly shared the first tastes with her big brother. They both agreed, and so did all of us, these are very, very yummy pretzels. We had never made any before and I had my doubts after so much "help" but they were so good, several kids wanted me to make more right them---so did Daddy! These will definitely be a treat that we indulge in often!

Check back tomorrow for more Summer Faith Adventure fun from TenKidsandaDog.

Summer Faith Adventure--day 2

We had another fun day with Holy Heroes---Summer Faith Adventure.

You can see our day-1 here.

I also wanted to share here at the beginning of the post what I did to make the crossword puzzle and word search puzzle more suitable for my 7 and 9 year olds. For the crossword, I made a list of the words that answered the crossword questions. This allowed him to still read the questions but helped him in finding the correct answers.

The word search also has questions that need to be answered--I made the words available and then went over the questions with my seven year old. This give me the opportunity to explain some of the terms to her.

Here are Mark and Grace enjoying today's song. We love this part of the program! After all- we are a singing family!
Next we moved on to the craft of the day--stained glass windows. We didn't have the wax paper that was called for, but I did have tracing paper, and this worked just fine. The kids made a frame, taped the tracing paper to the back of the frame, drew a design on the paper, and then applied tissue paper to make their window.

They loved the way their "windows" turned out.

A nice addition to our windows.

I had another idea for some of the big kids. Since I had tracing paper, I found my all time favorite liturgical year coloring book and Amy copied the picture of St. Francis with permanent markers.

She the made a "frame" for her stained glass picture and it is now also hanging in our back window.

Fenestrae Fidei: A coloring companion for the Catholic Mosaic, is a wonderful, intricate coloring book for older kids (and their moms) featuring 4 or 5 saints of the month following the liturgical year.

Each coloring page in the Fenestrae Fidei is accompanied by a short biography of the featured saint.

Last night, Laura made the dough for the stained glass sugar cookies. Since she was kind enough to do this, all we had to do today was smash Jolly Rancher candy into tiny little pieces. This was great, great fun for all involved.

I now know that Jolly Rancers are very sticky candy when the temperature gets over ninety degrees, the humidity is very high and you have no air conditioning. I had put the candy in the freezer to make it more brittle. This helped a little bit, but not much. But as you will see it didn't hurt the final cookie product.

We rolled our pre-made dough into long "snakes" and then

made window shapes and some circles. These are put on a cookie sheet covered with aluminum foil. I believe if you skipped this step you would never, ever get the final cookies off the cookie sheet.

We kept our candy seperated into colors. They looked very pretty, but as soon as they came back out of the freezer, the powdery candy pieces fused together into a very hard chunk....

so we called Daddy in to help dig the candy out of the dishes. The cookies have now been cooked, the candy is added, and then the cookies are returned to the oven for a few more minutes to completely melt the candy---making lovely stained glass.

It worked!

I think they are too pretty to eat.

But I was the only one to think that.

Some kids took little licks,

others licked and licked and licked. (notice that tongue)

Another popular way to eat them was too nibble, nibble, nibble, and then munch on the candy!

If you are 4 and don't really like to get too sticky, and you have eaten all the cookie part of your cookie, you are forced to lick the remaining candy in the above fashion.

Since today's temperature reached 90---which is almost unheard of here in central New York this summer---the game of Sheep and Wolves did not last very long, but everyone did have a great time. Mark elected Dan to be the shepherd because he plans to enter the seminary next fall. I though this was great thinking on Mark's part!

It was another fun day, enjoying our Summer Faith Adventure. Remember, there is still time to sign up!

Tomorrow we are heading to the science museum (yeah) so we won't be doing our Summer Faith Adventure day 3 until Thursday---which is a great plus for this program, you can miss a day, but NOT miss a day!