Hands on Holy Week for kids

As we make our way through Holy Week, looking forward to the glory of Easter Sunday, I thought I would share with you how I helped our children better understand exactly what Our Lord suffered for us, for our sinfulness.

Realizing that my children benefit from visual, hands on learning, I turned to Catholic Icing and Holy Heroes for help. Honestly, we did not participate in the Lenten Adventure every day, but most days we at least did the coloring page and maybe the word searches. We also did the Stations of the Cross with our parish every Friday but one. After daily Mass a few weeks ago, (our homeschool community gathers every Friday for Mass) one of our priests gave the children a "tour" of the Stations of the Cross. He asked the children if any of them could name all 14 stations in order. There was silence. Then one small hand rose from the group. It was my Anna. Could she? She could! Believe me, I can not. My heart was filled with happiness listening to her tiny voice carefully name those stations. My greatest desire is to lead my children into a deep and lasting relationship with God and their Catholic faith. I truly believe that by utilizing these websites, my children have a much greater understanding of their faith than I had even fifteen years ago. And that is a truly good and beautiful thing, my friends.

Catholic Icing has these wonderful downloads to make peg dolls. I bought the Passion set and some pegs and some paint. I will not tell you how much I spent to ship those things to Germany, but when Anna asked if she could try and paint their faces, I said "No way!". I am amazed at how wonderful they turned out. The kids also followed the instructions of how to build Jerusalem out of blocks. Now that we have all the parts assembled, tomorrow we can reenact the Passion of Our Lord in a very hands on way!

This was the development stage, trying to figure out how to best build the walls. We tried train tracks and regular blocks, but in the end, the Jenga blocks made the best walls.

Coming together, but we need to draw in the city now.

This has nothing to do with Holy Week, other than Peter needed to be distracted so that we could work. Every day, I have to find ways to keep him out of trouble. Most days, I don't succeed! Please don't pay any attention to the fact that he is wearing his sister's dress. I promise I dress him in his own clothes every morning!

I also promise that when showing them the layout of the city, I did not refer to the upper city and lower city as "the poor village" and the "rich village" as my children have labeled them!

Really, I had a lot of fun painting these! I am looking forward to making the Resurrection set and the Saint set as well.

Aren't they so cute!

That little guy in the background has already taken apart this version and we will have to rebuild yet again tomorrow. But that is OK. We still love him anyway.