(And All My) Work Be Praise

It's going to be a long time before everyone smiles together. I didn't want to lose momentum after our Good Friday activities, so we made these resurrection rolls on Saturday afternoon. The link goes into more detail, but in short, we talked about Jesus being sinless (white marshmallow) and his burial (anointed with oil and spices, being sealed in the tomb). Owen rocking the train engineer hat. "Anointing Jesus' body" with butter and cinnamon-sugar. Ready to eat! It worked! It's hollow! The empty "tomb." Before the boys woke up Sunday morning, we rolled their paper-bag stones away, folded up the "linen," and removed clothespin-Jesus from the tomb. Isaac found this gem of an old-school Sunday school picture of the angel talking to one of the women and attached a sign saying, "He is not here. He has risen!"  Like the three-year-old picture of Levi and Owen in the background? We m...

watercolor crosses We did a trial run of Palm Sunday on Saturday morning, so that the kids would be familiar with the celebrations come Sunday morning. (In the end, they all stayed home sick on Sunday. Boo.) I traced their hands on green paper, cut them out, and taped them to popsicle sticks: instant palms! (Palms. Hands. Get it?) Isaac read them the Palm Sunday account first, and showed them the map of Jerusalem to illustrate how Jesus entered the city. And then the fun part: throwing sweatshirt jackets on the floor, for the Daddy-donkey to walk on! Later, Silas played Jesus and rode in on Isaac's back. Levi ran in circles around them shouting hosanna, while Owen followed along behind pleading to ride on the donkey. Happy chaos. On Monday, we started a tomb project . Step one: paint the top side of a paper plate black. Later in the day, we painted the bottom side brown. (I only had red paper plates. Thanks for supporting this craft, Papa John's....

Our little Bible curriculum used X for cross, so I planned this week to lead into Palm Sunday. Besides making a few crosses/Xs out of pretzel sticks, we didn't do any cross-related crafts. The curriculum, though, had a great explanation of how we "cross out" mistakes when we make them on paper, and how Jesus "crossed out" our sins on the cross. I'm always grateful for more age-appropriate language to talk about big theological truths. Owen colored a xylophone by number (from this packet ) and made a paper/popsicle stick xylophone. I cut out the bars from another page in the linked packet, then had him arrange them by size (largest to smallest). Then he glued them, in order, onto popsicle sticks (two taped together, since one wasn't long enough). I made Levi sit this one out, since Owen almost never gets to do things on his own (and because it took me long enough to cut out the first set of bars, I didn't want to do a second set). He was surpris...

rainbow penne In honor of St. Patrick's Day, we did a rainbow week. (See last year's St. Patrick's Day ideas here .) As with marshmallow week , since this was a month ago and I really can't remember the specifics of our week, I'll just do the story-by-picture version.  I dyed two boxes of penne pasta for stringing necklaces -- just a splash of vinegar and food coloring in a ziploc bag, shake it all up, and spread it out to dry. My blue and purple both turned out rather black, but I didn't bother experimenting to find out why or how to fix it.  drying on waxed paper Levi went through two rounds of the rainbow before losing interest. It was harder than I anticipated for him to get the yarn (which kept fraying at the end) through the small penne hole. Owen didn't even try. I kept one large jar of dyed pasta and threw out the rest. Maybe it'll make another appearance in the future! Strange: we had a bout of the stomach flu surroun...

exploring with the five senses Marshmallow week was so long ago now that I barely even have the desire to document it. But, so as not to ignore it completely, I'll do a picture-heavy version: Levi and Owen traced their names with glue (well, I helped Owen) and then lined them with mini marshmallows. (Idea here .) Meanwhile, Silas scooped mini marshmallows from one bowl to another using a tablespoon. He might have gotten one or two into the bowl instead of on the floor . . .  In the name of science, we experimented with dissolving colored marshmallows. The tall glasses on the left were filled with very warm water; the short glasses on the right, with cold water. You can only just start to see it in this picture, but the warm water really took on the colors of the marshmallows (pink and green), while the cold water stayed clear even after several hours. (Idea here .) Owen used mini tongs to move marshmallows from plate to paper, counting to the number...