Lent

Q&A for Lent and Easter

Author(s): 
Theresa K. Driscoll
Kelley L. Renz
This is a rather unique resource for Lent. It's a quiz book written at three levels of difficulty with all sorts of questions and answers about the Catholic Church's celebration of Lent and Easter. It primarily focuses on Church liturgy, with a very significant focus on the process of Christian initiation, culminating with the Sacraments of Initiation at the Easter Vigil. These aren't the kind of questions and answers that you would expect your children to memorize in every particular.

Woven Cross Kit from Illuminated Ink

The Woven Cross Kit provides materials for three beautiful woven crosses. Each kit comes with thin strips of vellum paper 3 ½” x 3” (The primary kit colors are green, purple, and black with gold accents), gold rhinestuds, red metal hearts, and step-by-step illustrated instructions. The quality and beauty of the materials are impressive. The project also comes in in a Pastel kit.

Passion Play Cut'n'Color Kit from Illuminated Ink

The 3-D Passion Play Cut ‘n Color Kit creates a spectacular miniature theater when completed. It displays in a circle format and includes four ready-to-color, 3-dimensional scenes (The Last Supper, The Agony in the Garden, The Crucifixion, and the Resurrection). Three are back to back on the bottom and one is perched on top. (You might like to display it on a lazy-susan in order to change between scenes). Easy-to-follow, step-by-step, illustrated instructions are provided to insure success.

Stations of the Cross for Children Poster Set

Book cover: 'Stations of the Cross for Children Poster Set'
Author(s): 
Julianne Will
This is a very nice, very inexpensive (about $10), large-size set of the Stations of the Cross (created especially for children) appropriate for homes and classrooms. The drawings are simple (they remind me a little of Tomie dePaola's drawings) and what my husband would describe as "sanitized". Our first inclination was to think these were too sanitized, but when we compared them to our more "traditional" set (which cost us $30 and are about half the size), we realized that the other set, too was without blood.

A Year With God

Book cover: 'A Year With God: Celebrating the Liturgical Year'
A Year With God is simply THE purchase of the year! Completely original, inspiring, and unique, the abundance of fresh ideas and activities will re-energize your religion class and re-motivate you to make your homeschool a truly Catholic school in every sense of the word. Spanning the liturgical year, A Year With God contains hundreds of carefully detailed and illustrated projects and activities. Nearly all of these can be extended into several other projects, giving you many, many years of exciting projects to work on with your students.

A Treasure Chest of Traditions for Catholic Families

Book cover: 'A Treasure Chest of Traditions for Catholic Families'
Author(s): 
Monica McConkey
with laminated "jelly-proof" covers

During the past few years, there has been a renewed interest in beginning and in continuing traditions within our families within the context of the liturgical year. This book has been written to help make these celebrations easier to plan as well as to provide countless new ideas. Some of these ideas are original while others are traditional. This book is especially well-suited for families with children in the preschool years up through the late elementary years.

My Path to Heaven

Book cover: My Path to Heaven
Author(s): 
Geoffrey Bliss, S.J.
Illustrator(s): 
Caryll Houselander

This is one of the nicest educational materials I've come across (and I think that's saying a lot). What this book amounts to is a simplified form of the Spiritual Exercises of Saint Ignatius, designed to be understood by children. This is cleverly done with a very detailed picture for each of the twelve chapters. The child studies the details of the pictures and then the parent or the child reads the text (two or three pages) which explains the details of the pictures. The child is then invited to look at the picture again.