Building Cathedrals
Going to a Catholic grade school growing up, we were allowed the very rare opportunity to forgo our uniforms and wear green on St. Patrick’s Day. There is nothing better than telling an 8 year old she can wear jeans and a green t-shirt to school instead of her uniform. Hence, St. Patrick has always held a special place in my heart!
Sometimes I get over eager to share about all the saints with my 2.5 year old. The truth is, he is not quite ready to learn about each and every saint in the Church calendar. So I have found it more satisfying to spend several weeks talking about a particular saint and spreading out activities that make virtues or history more concrete. So we have already had a week of stories and talking about St. Patrick and more is on the way. So far, Dash really loves that Patrick taught about the Father, Son and Holy Spirit using the shamrock leaves. We will bring in the image of the rainbow this week.
We have several books on St. Patrick. Pingry’s book prompted us to look up some Irish jig music and have a rousing Irish dance. We made salt dough shamrocks and painted them green. As always, catholicculture.org has great historical and activity info. We tried to bake shamrock cupcakes but they didn’t really come out since we made a rich, homemade cake. I think you needed the spongy consistency of boxed cake mix for the shapes to work. The 4 Real Learning forum has lots of ideas if you search under St. Patrick.
I’d love to hear if you all have any ideas or traditions for celebrating and teaching about St. Patrick!
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