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On the feasts of the Sacred and Immaculate Hearts we made paper hearts. These are made with nothing but paper, markers and glue. They are simplistic but very pretty. You will need: a full sheet of red paper pieces or sheets of yellow, brown, orange, green, and pink markers: red, brown and yellow glue scissors Let’s start with the Sacred Heart of Jesus…  Cut the sheet of red paper in half and fold each half  long ways. Cut out a half heart so that when you open it to will be a whole heart. Cut out a larger yellow “flame” and a smaller orange “flame.” Cut out two strips of brown for the cross. Cut our short pointy brown strips for the crown of thorns. Glue the orange flame on top of the yellow flame and the cross on top of the orange flame. Glue that onto the top of the underside of the heart as pictured. Now make “X” shapes where the crown of thorns should be, all the way across. Now use a brown (or black) marker to make a curved line for the spear wound. Add red around it and a blood drop. That’s it for the Sacred Heart of Jesus! ~*~ Now for the Immaculate Heart of Mary! Do the same as above to make the heart and flames. Glue the flames to the top-underside of the heart. Cut out simple pink flower shapes and add those across the center of the heart. They don’t need to be perfect. When you place them beside each other you won’t see the mistakes on the flower shapes. Use a yellow marker to create the flower’s center. We added small green leaf shapes around the flower, too. This is the “hard” part…making the sword: Cut out a cross shape and round the ends on the handle parts. Use a brown marker to create the look of a handle. Use a red marker to make a curved line for the cut onto the heart and use scissors to put a slit in the red cut. Slip the sword through the cut and glue it on the under side. That’s it!! So paper simple! Sacred Heart of Jesus and Immaculate Heart of Mary, pray for us! May God Bless you all! ~Jen-Marie

St. Helena (aka: St. Helen) is the Mother of Emperor Constantine and found the true cross of Christ. Her feast day is Aug. 18 (traditional calendar). Read more about her HERE and HERE .  Elizabeth and I got a little glitter glue happy with this one! The design is simple, but the glitter glue made it sing! 😮 ♪ ♫  We made 7 rays from yellow felt and added a bit of orange permanent marker to them to make them look more interesting. We glued them onto a white oval which as a little bigger than the cross we had made from two strips of dark brown felt.  We added silver glitter glue to the white area and gold glitter glue to the yellow area. We also added a bit of red glitter glue to the yellow area and three drops on the cross.  St. Helena, pray for us! ~JenMarie and Elizabeth

For the feast of the Holy Name of Mary we made a simple sugar cookie dessert. We used our sugar cookie recipe and our M-A-R-Y cookie cutters to make a super yummy dessert! To give our cookies a blue color we added blue sugar to the top of the cookies before we baked them.  Of course, we realized too late that we didn’t have any more blue decorating sugar. So we made some! Just place 3 or 4 tablespoons of granulated sugar into a zip-loc bag and then add a drop or two of blue food coloring. Zip up the bag and give it a good shake! If the sugar very wet you can spread it on out on wax paper to dry, but we just used our blue sugar as it was.  The cookies came out of the oven with a blue glitter look! Perfect for Mary! Once they were cool we used some whipped cream from a spray can to make a long row of cream. Then we added the M-A-R-Y letters to the front of the row. Here is Mary’s name written in the clouds!! *Don’t have the letter cookie cutters? That’s okay! If you don’t have alphabet cookie cutters, try making the letter by hand. Maybe roll out the dough and hand-cut the letters with a knife. Or make the letters by creating long strains or ropes of rolled dough (my kids call them snakes) and form the long strains into the letter shapes. It’s a great activity for kids of all ages! Super yummy and fun! Have a blessed day! ~JenMarie

One way I like to help my kids learn and retain knowledge of our faith is through Catholic picture dictionaries. Their simple design makes them easy to pick-up and read when you have only a few free minutes. To help them retain these words and meanings, I created a “Catholic Words” printable notebooking sheet. This page has space for: the name of the Catholic word they are learning the definition (some definitions may need to be shortened) a picture of the idea/item, if possible Each page has space for 3 words. My kids have these pages in a 3-ring binder and they add a word a day. They do this during the school day when they are finished all their other work and they are waiting on me to check/help them. Each night I write a Catholic word onto our blackboard. Then, during school time the next day, they pull out their Catholic dictionary look up the word and write it down, along with the definition. They also draw a picture of the item or idea if they can. These are the books we used to look up the Catholic words: This book is the one my older kids use: The Catholic Picture Dictionary – by S.J. Rev. Harold A. Pfeiffer (Author) This one was better for the younger kids: My First Catholic Picture Dictionary - by Lawrence Lovasik (Author) Has anyone ever use this book? I’m wondering if it’s good: A Catholic Child's Picture Dictionary - by Ruth Hannon (Author) Vocabulary Sheets Along with the “Catholic Words” sheet I created a “vocabulary” sheet. This one is for everyday words. My kids use this one when they come across a word they don’t know. They write it down and look it up. The word area on this page has space for: the word the definition antonyms synonyms a sentence and they can draw a picture, if possible These are also kept in the same 3-ring binder. They have a page with a tab between the two sections. Both these pages and a cover page are available below. Download these vocabulary pages here: Enjoy! Hope you have a blessed school year! ~JenMarie

Things have been busy around my house, so I’m a little late getting the September ornaments out. Since I can’t post all of the Sept. ornaments today, I’m just going to quickly post St. Anna the Prophetess, who feast day is historically Sept. 1. St. Anna the Prophetess was in the temple the day of Jesus Presentation. She was over-joyed to see Jesus and spoke about him to all who were there.(Luke 2:21-38) St. Anna’s ornament is a scroll and it reads: ”This child has created Heaven and Earth.” It was made using off-white felt, which was cut into a long rectangle (about 1 inch x 3 inches). The outer edge of the rectangle is out-lined with brown permanent marker.  The sentence was added with a black permanent marker. I recommend that you draw the letters by creating dots. Using lots of dots to form the letters will make the letters look cleaner. If you draw the letters as you would on paper they can look fuzzy. Plus, it’s just easier to write on felt that way! 🙂  Next, the ends of the rectangle were hot glued and rolled up so they look more like a scroll.  St. Anna, pray for us! May our eyes always be open and able to see Jesus in the faces of others. God Bless. ~JenMarie and my crafting buddy, Elizabeth Personal Update: My surgery went well. The doctor was to remove my last remaining ovary in the hopes to end my endometriosis pain. After the surgery, he said my ovary was missing it’s ”webbing”. It was hanging loose and bumping into my intestines which had created a hernia. So he fixed the hernia, too. Now the ovary is gone and the hernia is fixed. My doctor thinks I should be feeling great in a few weeks – just about the time I’ll start having menopause set in. Aside from that, things are going wonderfully and I’m feeling improvement each day!  Thank you so much for all your prayers! I know they have helped!

St. Robert Bellarmine was born 3rd of 10 children. In 1560 he entered the Society of Jesus and after his ordination he began to teach at Louvain (1570-1576) where he became famous for his Latin sermons. In 1576, he was appointed to the chair of controversial theology at the Roman College, becoming Rector in 1592; he went on to become Provincial of Naples in 1594 and Cardinal in 1598. Continue reading about him HERE . It’s a very interesting read! His Feast day is Sept. 17th in the new calendar and May 13th in the traditional calendar. Because St. Robert is often pictured wearing his Cardinal’s hat (AKA: biretta) we made a mini red biretta. I have to tell you we had a hard time coming up with an easy ornament for St. Robert! This ornament may be a bit difficult for some of you. If so, consider creating a mini solar system – He was part of the Galileo case. (Read more in the above link) To create this ornament you will need red felt and hot glue. If you want to add the book you will also need maroon and white felt. We started creating the biretta by making the above shape from red felt. It was a 1 inch by 4 inch piece of felt. It was sectioned into 4 parts. Each of the 4 parts had two bumps. The end bumps were more of a triangle shape. Then we glued the ends together, so it was in a circle shape – like above. Now we glued the bumps together in pairs. The bump on the one section was paired with a bump on the section beside it. DON’T glue the two triangle bumps together yet!  So you should now have three paired bumps. The two triangle-shaped bumps should now be folded down to make that top portion flat. A biretta’s top only has 3 bumps and one flat part.  Now we added glue to the inside of the hat, to secure the bumped parts and the folded triangle shaped parts. We also added glue to the corners and pinched them together to make it more of a square shape. If you want to add a book for the biretta to sit on, create one by gluing three smaller rectangles into a larger folded rectangle. Then glue the hat to the book.  Add a threaded loop to the center of the hat to hang it on the liturgical tree.  Note: If you are having trouble understanding my instructions for the biretta, please watch the video below. His pattern in the video is a little different than mine, but it may help you make the above ornament. By the look of the video, I have a feeling paper birettas are easier to make than felt! The video shows how to make a human-sized biretta. You might like this for an All Saints day costume! There are many priest and bishop saints who wore a biretta. You might also like to make full-sized birettas for your kids to wear as you celebrate St. Robert’s feast day! Enjoy! Have a blessed day as you celebrate St. Robert of Bellarmine! ~JenMarie and Elizabeth

St. Jerome was a priest, Doctor of the Church, and translator of the The Latin Bible which was translated from the Hebrew and Aramaic)  His feast day is Sept. 30th (new and traditional calendars) Read about him HERE and HERE . We created a lion ornament for St. Jerome because he is often depicted with a lion. There is an old story told about him that tells how St. Jerome tamed a lion who’s paw was injured. After the lion was healed he became more of a pet for the saint. — Is the story true? I’m not sure, but it’s a fun story to help kids differentiate him from other saints. The lion was an easy ornament. We made the lion using only medium brown felt and yellow felt. We used black and brown permanent markers to add detail to the parts.  St. Jerome. pray for us! May God bless you all with joy! ~JenMarie and Elizabeth

St. Pio of Pietrelcina, priest, religious, and stigmatist, is remembered on Sept. 23. He is an amazing saint and there are many great books out there about him. You can also read more about him HERE and HERE .  Because St. Pio was a priest and a stigmatist, we made an ornament that depicts his holy hands holding the Blessed Sacrament.  If you want, you can make the bandage brown which is St. Pio\’s traditional bandage, but I chose off-white so you could see the blood marks… it\’s more \”real\” to the kids.  To create this ornament we used tan, white (for the host), off-white (for the bandages), and a mixed gray felt. We used red and brown permanent markers for adding detail to the host and the bandages.  St. Pio, pray for us! May God bless you all with joy! ~JenMarie and Elizabeth

If you would have known Joseph of Cupertino as a boy, you never would have thought he would become a flying saint! He was neglected and unwanted by his mother, so he became very slow,  hot-tempered, and absent minded. As a young man he failed at all the jobs he was given. He was not accepted by the Franciscans, he was turned out by the Capuchins, and so he returned home. His mother was not happy to see him. She managed to get him into the Franciscan monastery as a servant.  During this time Joseph began to change. He began to learn humility, penance, and he worked hard. He was then accepted into the Franciscan order. He struggled with learning but eventually became a priest.  After his priesthood, he began to perform miracles. He was seen over 70 times rising from the floor while he prayed or said Mass. Sometimes he flew very high. On one occasion he carried a huge cross through the air to a Calvary group, The cross was thirty-six feet high, but he carried it with ease! Talk about super hero power! 🙂  After word of his miracles spread, St. Joseph was often kept hidden. But people flocked to talk to him in confession. He converted many people before he died on Sept. 18 1663, at the age of 60. His feast day is Sept. 18 in the Traditional Calendar. Read more about him HERE . Our ornament depicts St. Joseph flying through the air!!  We used medium brown, peach/tan, yellow and white felt. We cut out the parts as pictured above. We used black permanent marker to make shadows on his robe – to look like he’s flying. Then we used brown and black permanent markers to make a face on the circle we cut out for his head. We also added orange to the yellow halo.  St. Joseph is proof that there is hope for every human being! We can all change and become true saints! St. Joseph of Cupertino, pray for us! God bless you all with joy! ~JenMarie and Elizabeth

Last year my two 4th graders were learning about the Making of the Thirteen Colonies. We were reading Book 2 of ““. The book included a simple timeline. So I created this timeline page for my kids to use so they could create their own timeline notebook. Each of the pages includes a section for them to write the topic of the timeline. It also has writing blocks so the kids can write the date and a little about the historical event. The kids also “finished” drawing the line from the writing blocks to the timeline line which is in the middle of the page. We placed our timelines in a 3 ring binder and added a cover page to the front of the binder. Then the kids could add a page as they work their way through history! There are two versions of this timeline. One runs side to side on a vertical page and the other runs side to side on a horizontal page. Each as a cover to match the direction of the pages you choose. I first made the horizontal timeline page, but the vertical pages seemed to be easier for my kids to understand, as they flip from one page to the next. Choose whichever you like best: Download the Timeline Sheets Here: These are great pages to use if you are creating mini biographies of famous people like the saints, and they work well when learning about any topic of history – Church history, US history or world history. These were great to have last year and I plan to use them again this year as we work through book 3 and 4 in the “A History of US” set. Hope you are having a great school year! God Bless. ~JenMarie

Saint Gregory the Great is the patron saint of teachers. He is one of the four great doctors of the Latin Church and his feast day is Sept. 3 on the new calendar (March 12 on the Traditional calendar). He built 7 monasteries and is know for his contributions to the Liturgy of the Mass and Office. He was also pope from the 3rd of September in 590 to his death on March 12th 604. Read more about him HERE . The ornament for Gregory the Great consists of a book with a quill pen, a Papal Tiara with the three crowns, and the Holy Spirit.  We made it with maroon, yellow, light brown, white and off-white felt. Plus, we used brown and black permanent markers on the book pages, as well as, the quill pen.  We used gold glitter glue on the yellow crowns (on the Papal Tiara) and we added a few drops of red glitter glue to add ”gem”. Later we decided to add a Holy Spirit. (Ya, we make this all up as we go along! Just bear with me!) We glued all the parts onto the light brown felt and we added silver glitter glue around the Holy Spirit.  St. Gregory the Great, pray for us – especially us mother who homeschool or those who are teachers! We have a big job and always need help! God Bless, ~JenMarie

St. Matthew, Apostle, evangelist, and martyr, is the patron saint of bankers and accountants. His feast day is Sept. 21 in the new and traditional calendars.  Because he wrote the Gospel of Matthew, we added a book to his ornament. We added the money bag because he is the patron saint for those who deal with money.    To create this ornament we used charcoal, tan, maroon, white and gray felt. We used a hole punch to make the coins. If your hole punch is not 100% sharp you will need to cut out the uncut sections, and that easy to do. We used brown and black permanent markers to add details to the white ”paper” and the money bag.  St. Matthew, pray for us! God bless you all with joy! ~JenMarie sand Elizabeth