Easter Activities

He is Risen!  He is Risen Indeed!

I love Easter.  The story of Easter is what give us hope in this dark world and is the most life changing story of all time.  We have already been working through some activities surrounding the Easter story and the girls are getting to better understand a rather difficult story.

Next week, we will review the Passion week activities starting with Palm Sunday.  The book we are basing our activities is found here on Amazon.  Each day and part of the story has a different color assigned to it.

Green - palms
Purple - bread and wine shared with friends
Red - Jesus' death
Brown - grave
White - Angel said "He's Risen"
Yellow - bright sun

It is just a nice, simple book that is not too deep for little kids to understand.  Because the girls are much older and able to understand I plan on reviewing the Exodus from Egypt more to help them understand the idea of sacrifice and the idea of the perfect lamb.  One day I want to plan a real Seder dinner but not just yet.

I have seen pictures of lots of different Resurrection Gardens and have plans for making one of our own.

Lots of fun and reflection involved.  Blessings to you and praying you come to a greater understanding of the Hope of Easter!

Christmas Advent

Now that you have taken a look into how our family is celebrating a Thanksgiving Advent of sorts I wanted to give you a sneak peak into our Christmas Advent. Each day in December leading up to Christmas we have a special activity planned.  Some are simple crafts, others are baking adventures and we also have some service projects in the mix too.  I made another simple calendar like I did for Thanksgiving and have the slips of paper with each activity written on it as a count down to Christmas.

I love spending time together as a family and I know that by planning out different activities for us to do together not everything will go according to my plan.  That's O.K.  (or at least I am learning to be ok with it.) I want my husband and my kids to want to be at home more than anywhere else in the world and for me that means taking time to think through how we can spend time as a family and planning fun activities.

Thanks to the internet I have no lack of ideas to fill 24 days with great Christmas ideas.  I have some friends that have a few really great ideas.  Check out how Lorrie and her family celebrate Advent.  Also, check out this great idea that Ashley and her family did last year.  In addition to all the fun activities I have planned we will be using Jesse Tree devotionals each night as a way to bring our attention to Christ's birth as the reason for the season.

I love spending time all year gathering supplies for the activities we do in December and hope that you feel inspired to  spend some time connecting as a family and sharing in the joy of the Christmas season.  If you would like to win a handmade (by me) advent calendar please leave a comment and I will enter you in the drawing.  The contest will end on Friday, November 25th, 2011. Please leave a way for me to get in contact with you so I can send it to you.  Thanks and many blessings to you!

Here is a picture of the advent calendar you could win if you leave a comment.

Valentine learning fun

I know this is incredibly late but I thought I would at least post some valentine pictures so I can have record of what we did that week.

Valentine basket: wrote letters and sent them to family members as well as each other.

Craft: Love bug. Cute and simple

Fine motor: sorting beads, counting activities, stringing beads, valentine erasers

Tic-tac-toe


Clips on a heart basket

Science: magnifying glasses to examine rose petals


Weaving ribbons


Dressing basket: includes buttons, snaps, zippers


Played shape memory with cards from 1+1+1


Upper and lowercase alphabet match

Thanks!