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!
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!
