Our May Crowning "Hail Mary" Writing Practice

For the month of May we learned about a few of the Marian prayers and went to our parish's May crowning and basically did all things "Our Lady."
The girls love looking through all of the flower/seed catalogs that we get in the mail every Spring so we usually incorporate them into one of our crafts or lessons, and this year it was once again, a collage. But the change from last year's activity was that both girls wrote out the Hail Mary prayer themselves instead of just pasting a copy on their paper. This took some time and we didn't complete it in one day but they were both very proud of their work when it was finished.
Then of course the poring over the flower pictures and choosing just the right ones (the ones "Mary would like best") and cutting them all out took another day or two. All said and done these collages took about 3 days to complete but the writing practice was so timely for both girls and really boosted their confidence especially with sounding out skills.
One of the other prayers we had been learning about was the Canticle of Mary which I was able to find a performance of on youtube and the girls insisted on listening to it over and over and over again. The video was a bit cheesy but I figured at least it wasn't the Frozen soundtrack for a change, and bonus was they learned the words of the prayer! Here is the link to the video:
Canticle of Mary youtube link

                                                           

The Wonderful Distraction of Spring!!!

So in my attempt to keep track of our homeschool life, I am happy to say that we are way behind in documenting things because Spring has finally come and dragged us outside! We have still been doing school but in much more of a, "Hey, it's nice outside let's go do Nature Study for hours!" kind of way. Which has been so refreshing after such a long, cold winter.

We recently bought a great wagon and the kiddos have had hours of fun playing a variety of trip games like, "Escape the Tornado" "Vacation Fun," and "The Israelites Escape the Egyptians." All creative and dramatic--who knew a wagon could spark such fun?

May Flowers for Mary

These were collages made from Burpee seed catalogs that I can just never bring myself to throw away. They have such beautiful, colorful images of flowers that I just knew we'd use them sooner or later. And here they are transformed into wreaths of flowers for Mary, celebrating her crowning in the month of May. We printed out the Hail Mary prayer and the girls glued them onto their papers and then chose lots of flowers to cut out and arrange around the prayer. This was a great way to identify types of flowers they knew as well as spot some new ones to look for as the summer months begin.

Spring Blossom Tree

April 2013: When there aren't yet REAL blossoms on the trees outside, we made our own from a bare branch and some tissue paper. The girls enjoyed making the pretty flowers from petal shapes that I pre-cut from pink & white tissue. They needed a little help affixing them to the actual branch but with some patience we made it happen. It was a nice, Spring-y addition to the schoolroom and a hopeful sign that one day Winter would indeed end.

Lion & Lamb of Springtime!

March 2013: We made mobiles to illustrate the phrase, "In like a lion, out like a lamb" that is so often used to describe the season of Spring. For some reason I only have a pic of the lamb which we made using cotton balls but the opposite side had a lion's face that we made using yellow yarn. The materials we used were also useful in a discussion about textures. The girls were very happy with these and liked to see them hanging in the window. We also used them as part of our weather each morning--deciding if the day's weather was like a lion (wintry) or like a lamb (mild and Spring-like).

St. Patrick's Shamrocks

March 2013: We love St. Patrick's Day at our house and my girls really enjoyed hearing the story/legend of the real man, St. Patrick this year. We created some shamrocks to decorate our dreary March windows that were also visual lessons on the nature of the Trinity: Father, Son & Holy Spirit.

Easter Artwork and Poems

March 2013: We decided to try our hands at writing acrostic poems for Easter this year. I helped out some with coming up with words that would fit, but really they did most of this on their own and I was so pleased with their finished poems. We will definitely be trying this for other holidays and themes.

March 2013: These were 2 of the activities we did for Easter this past Spring. the girls LOVE coloring and especially coloring in something I draw for them--their own custom coloring book pages--so we did some rather ornate eggs and they enjoyed coloring them (some got further than others...) and adding some Easter stickers. They were very proud of these :)

MORE Spring collages

We were really on a collage spree in the Spring, the girls wanted to keep working in this media so we did! Here are our rainbow collages that we created using photos from magazines. The girls had WAY too much fun being distracted by the magazines themselves so I began helping them by cutting out large blocks of colors and letting them cut them down to the size they needed for their rainbows. They did really enjoy making the actual rainbows once all of the cutting was done :)

Spring Collages

 

April 2013: We traced the girls' hands to make a tree throughout the 4 seasons of the year. We chose tissue paper to create a collage to show the different stages of foliage the tree would display during the changing seasons. They really enjoyed this project and especially thinking about/remembering what trees look like in Fall and Winter.