Lent: Spring Nature Walk

On our way through reading the New Testament in The Jesus Storybook Bible, we read "The Singer." This story is taken from the Sermon on the Mount and talks about how Jesus takes care of the birds and the wildflowers.

I had originally planned a craft project, but since it's been crazy summer-like weather, we headed out on a nature walk instead to look for signs of spring and things that God takes care of. Little did I know that it was actually the first day of Spring. No wait, I totally planned that, right?

First we had to pack up all our gear. In total, we had three strollers, three babies, two nature journals, six colored pencils, and a camera.
 
And we saw lots of signs of spring, croci in bloom, Maple trees budding, Magnolia blossoms...
 
 Ella also has a new springtime occupation: digging for worms in the backyard. She found 17 yesterday. She's lost all squeamishness about picking them up. Though this one was made into worm pie. Dirty hands, scraped knees-- must be spring.
 

Lent: Prayer Pretzels

Our next story in The Jesus Storybook Bible was "How to Pray." After reading the story, we made homemade soft pretzels.

Why pretzels? Because pretzels are the official bread of Lent. Legend has it that they were invented by monks to be given as rewards to children who learned their prayers. Their shape symbolized the shape of a person's arms folded over their chest in prayers.

We use a recipe by Alton Brown, and they always come out really yummy. I made the dough in the morning. It takes under an hour to rise. Then the girls helped me roll out and shape the dough. First you have to roll out long logs of dough. The littler folks will need help with this. Then you make it into a U shape and fold both ends over into the shape of a pretzel.
 
 Afterward, you boil the pretzels in a mixture of water and baking soda. Ella was then in charge of brushing the pretzels with egg yolk, and Mabel sprinkled the salt.
 
Bake until they are dark, golden brown and pretzelly looking. And enjoy!
 

Lent: Stained Glass crosses

Our next story in The Jesus Storybook Bible was "A little girl and a poor frail lady." The last lines of the story are "Jesus was making the sad things come untrue. He was mending God's broken world." So we made stained glass crosses to represent God putting broken things together to make something new. (I originally saw this craft on pinterest from Happy Home Fairy.)
 I cut an outline of a cross out of black construction paper and put it on a piece of clear contact paper. Then the girls and I cut up tons of pieces of different colors of tissue paper. I taped the contact paper sticky-side up onto the table.Then each girl stuck the tissue paper on their cross. Then I trimmed around the crosses and we put them in the window. Beautiful.
 

Lent: Fishing with Nets Sensory Tub

Next in our series of Lent activities, we read "Let's Go!" in The Jesus Storybook Bible by Sally Lloyd-Jones. Since this is the story of Jesus gathering his apostles who were fishermen, I made a Fishing with Nets sensory bin.

We filled a tub with water. I cut out a bunch of fish shapes from craft foam.

For our nets, we used a net bag from some limes and a net from some onions. The lime bag worked a lot better because it actually had a bag shape with a bottom and didn't have to be gathered up in anyway, so I cut the lime bag in two and taped the second half at the bottom so it would be easier to use.
The girls played with this awhile, but my 13 month old loved it. She really liked picking out all the fish with her hands and putting them in her net, then dumping them back in, and doing it again.
Ella decided to also recreate yesterday's story and baptized Jesus.
We also had a Fishy snack. We cut out fish shapes from cheese with a mini-cutter, and put them on woven wheat crackers.
 

Lent: Simple Coffee Filter Dove

Last year we did projects for the full 40 days of Lent, going through all the stories from The Jesus Storybook Bible by Sally Lloyd-Jones. But this year I decided to shorten it a bit and just do the New Testament.

This week we started with Jesus's birth, pulling out some of our fun advent activities we hadn't seen since Christmas.

For Day 2, we read "Heaven Breaks Through," the story of the baptism of Jesus. For our craft, we made coffee filter doves that can really fly.

Coffee Filter Dove Tutorial
You'll need:
2 white coffee filters
glue stick
3-4 ft piece of string
tape
scissors

Fold one coffee filter in half. This will be the wings.  Fold the other coffee filter into eighths. This will be the beak and tail.
 
 Cut the tip off of the tail filter. Glue it at the top of your wing filter. Glue the remaining part of the tail filter to the bottom of the wing filter for a tail. You may also want to put some glue inside the folds of the beak and tail. Draw on eyes if you like.
 
 Now tape your long string to the wing filter near the head, and take your doves for a flight! The girls have been flying their pet doves for days now.
 

ABC Egg Hunt

I was inspired by this great post on The Imagination Tree with lots of ideas for Fun with Plastic Eggs. We did an ABC Easter egg hunt.

Ella was looking for extra projects to do so I had her organize the whole project (with a little help from me on the harder to find letters. First we had to find a tiny object for each letter. We finally gave up on X and just did a foam letter X.

We used this great Alphabet Beginning Sounds Poster I downloaded from Homeschool Creations  to help us organize our finds. Fortunately we have a ton of tiny things in our house.
 
 Then we put an alphabet sticker on each egg and the corresponding object inside.
 

The next day we hunted for all the eggs and then opened them up and matched them with our chart again, a fun activity. Thanks for the inspiration The Imagination Tree!
 

For the Birds: Painted Wings

It's beautiful 65 degree day in March. It should be a great day, but Mommy is completely stuck on grumpy. Why do I always forget that I should never dress opinionated children before I've had my coffee? I really needed to go back to bed and start over, but yet I decided to plow through my plans for the day. Let me tell you, if you're feeling grumpy and frustrated with every little thing, the answer is not paint! And yet we did...
We decided to make some paper wings to play with. I cut them out of a big roll of paper and the girls painted them. Then Mommy had a complete meltdown and had to reboot the entire day. Fortunately the baby fell asleep while I was holding her giving me the perfect excuse to lie on the couch for an hour or so until she woke up, while parking the kids in front of PBS until I could be a civil person again.

But finally I did recover, somewhat. And we went outside to try out our wings. And finally got to enjoy the lovely day. We clipped on our wings with clothespins and the little cardinals flew.
 
 And stopped to peck some birdseed.
 
 And the windy day really gave us a good liftoff.