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Even though Lent is nearly over, there are still two weeks until Easter. That is plenty of time to work on some Lent and Holy Week activities as well as prepare a few fun things for the Easter Octave. After all, Easter is 50 Days of celebrating; don’t let it end on Easter Sunday!
Lent & Holy Week Activities
Lent does not always go as I planned or as I wished and so I look at Holy Week as a way to give it a short concentrated burst of looking to God before Easter. Here are a few last minute activities for the rest of Lent and Holy Week.
1. Sense of the Resurrection
If you have little kids, a Sense of the Resurrection is one of my favorite activities. There are only 12 activities and they all have to do with one of the 5 senses — tasting vinegar, washing feet and more. While many people use these throughout Lent, I recommend doing as many activities as you wish during Holy Week. And because it’s an instant download, you can buy today, shop tomorrow and spend the rest of the week working through it ;).
2. Lent Faith Folder
My daughter has recently become enamored with lapbooking and I found these fabulous Catholic Faith Folders from Holy Learning. They were kind enough to send me the Lent Faith Folder to review and it is a fantastic resource for Lent & Holy Week. The faith folder requires two file folders and has 19 elements on topics like the history of Lent, words we hear during Lent, Palm Sunday, the Triduum, countdown calendar, Stations of the cross and more! If you were to start this on Ash Wednesday, you would need to do an element every other day to get through it all.
My 7 year old has been the one working through the Lent Faith Folder and I would consider her to be on the young end of users for this. Personally, I would think 7-12 would probably be about right. There are elements for Lenten Commitments & a countdown calendar, but she isn’t yet at the age or maturity to do her own goal setting/tracking so I left those pieces out. Perhaps we will add them next year. It’s not too late to make use of the Faith Folder for this year, though!
There are at least 6 elements that could be done during this week and next. Each element is included 4 different ways– prefilled b&w, prefilled color, blank b&w, and blank color. This is awesome because I don’t mind using color ink and writing things is a special form of torture for my 7 year old. Alternately, you could print b&w files on colored paper.
Each element of the Lent Faith Folder covers the essentials of Lent and is faithful to Catholicism. It does a fabulous job of sharing the different practices of Lent and events of Holy Week, as well as providing space for tracking the days of Lent and Lenten sacrifices. You could use this every year as a refresher and moving from pre-filled to blank as skills improve. You could also slowly work through it over two years. That’s probably what we will do since we didn’t get to the first few weeks of booklets and things. My daughter has loved working on it and already asked if we could do a Christmas one :).
3. Resurrection Peg People
If you are lucky enough that you already have a stash of blank pegs on hand, you could easily finish the set of Passion Peg People from Catholic Icing to use during Holy Week. And, if you have wooden blocks, combine them with this interactive map of Jerusalem! If you have older children, they could make them as a craft instead of YOU making them for little ones :).
Easter Resources
I tend to lose sight of having adequate resources ready to celebrate Easter. I find that I spend a ton of time getting ready for Holy Week and Easter is usually dictated by visits with extended family. This year, we are taking Monday & Tuesday off of school to spend a little more time celebrating Easter.
If you are in the same boat, here are some great last minute Easter resources.
1. The Easter Book Basket
Every year I purchase new Easter books for my crew. I get out books about Holy Week activities on Palm Sunday and the rest come out around the time of the Easter Sunday vigil (that’s 8 or 9 pm around our neck of the woods).
I recently was sent a new book to review by Laura Wagner, Saint Mary Magdalene and the first Easter Egg.
Like the book of Saint Patrick, this book likes like the illustrations are made of felt. This super short story of Mary Magdalene and the first Easter egg is about 20 pages long and tells the story of how Mary Magdalene was the first to see Jesus and went to tell Caesar of His resurrection. Caesar, not believing her, said that if he did rise, the egg in her hand would turn red. It did and that is why we now die eggs for Easter. I’ve never heard this story before and it is very simply and cutely done. We were glad to add Saint Mary Magdalene and the first Easter Egg to our Easter book basket. You can see my review of her book about Saint Patrick here.
2. Easter Peg Dolls
Now, Laci @ CatholicIcing hasn’t released the Easter Peg dolls yet, but she said that she was going to just released the Resurrection Set of Peg dolls and they are BEAUTIFUL! So. If you love having these peg dolls for your little ones or your older ones need an artistic outlet, plan ahead. Buy a few bags of wooden peg people. Her last two sets were only $5 each so you are looking at a dozen peg dolls for the price of one on Etsy. Go get your craft on ;).
3. Color Easter Eggs
You could either color regular chickens eggs, paint paper mâché or wooden eggs in whatever color scheme you go for, OR you could try your hand at Pysanky. You can find directions and traditional patterns at PysankyBasics.com and the wooden eggs are available at Amazon.
Let’s finish Lent strong and observe the Tridiuum of Holy Week and give Easter it’s due.
Need more quick and easy tips and ideas? Try these:
Have a blessed Lent & Easter season!
Nicole
2 April 2015 at 12:17 PM (9 years ago)Great ideas! Thanks for sharing!
Nicole´s last blog post ..Homeschooling with the Easter Story
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