Thank you all so very much for your enthusiastic support for my Papal Lap Book! You all are the best, and I am so touched by all of your kind comments and generosity to my family! Since I spent so much time on the computer over the weekend I’ve had a little catching up to do around our home, in addition to trying to keep up with our school week, so I am once again extremely behind with answering emails. If you are still waiting for a response from me, do know that I usually do receive all the emails that have been sent (on occasion some disappear to my spam folder, but I am making an effort to check it frequently) and read and appreciate each and every one. However, even though I try, it is often impossible for me to respond to them all. So thank you again, and to those who have asked questions I will either email you soon, or try and make a point of trying to blog about those topics sometime in the future. 🙂
Anyways, back to the Lap Book! That brief study-guide/outline I shared in my last post (to go along with the Lap Book) was created very late Sunday night (or rather early Monday morning) and was thrown together rather quickly since I wanted to finish up the post to share with you all. I broke it into 5 “Units” (my original document read days, due to lack of sleep) based on the order in which I thought I would have my children complete the mini-books.
Since last Friday, the Feast of the Chair of St. Peter, we have been working on our first unit: St. Peter, The First Pope. The boys were gone most of Friday, but the girls had started working on their St. Peter’s Basilica Pop-up Books that day, and we read St. Peter’s Story. We continued this theme over the past few days.
(Remember, there is no “right” way to do this… Unit studies can be as simple or elaborate as you choose to make them, and just because something works well for my family, doesn’t mean it will for yours! Sometimes we put together a Lap Book in an afternoon, other times we spend weeks. My guess is we will spend the next two weeks completing this unit study and Lap Book, adding in additional reading, crafts and activities.)
Read:
Family Read Aloud:
Younger Children:
- St. Peter the Apostle by Father Lovasik
- St. Peter’s Story
- Peter Receives the Primacy from The New Catholic Picture Bible
Older Children:
- The First Christians: The Acts of Apostles for Children
- The Primacy of Peter from My Catholic Faith (link to online version)
- Catechism of the Catholic Church 551-553 (my document)
Other Reading:
- St. Peter page A Holy Card Prayer Book
- I think I’m going to send the little kids on a scavenger hunt to see how many of our Saint Books in which they can find Saint Peter! 😉
Explore:
- “Delivery of the Keys” Fresco by Pietro Perugino in 1482 – Sistine Chapel, Rome, Italy
- Virtual Tour of St. Peter’s Basilica (Vatican Website – Loved this!)
- St. Peter’s Basilica Interactive Website
- Of course my children had to find it on Google Earth too! 🙂
Copywork:
- Copy Matthew 16: 18-19 on to “The Primacy of Peter. (I added a traceable version for younger children, including my little ones.)
NOTE: I have created a second collection on Scribd where I will upload any additional documents I create to go along with our Papal Unit Study. I just added this traceable quote for younger children.
Begin Creating Lap Book Mini-Books:
- Write a Paragraph about St. Peter, for Some Special Popes, based on one of the reading assignments. (I’m creating a fill-in the blank for Chiquita and a reduced sized coloring picture for the two youngest. Twinkle Toes wrote a paragraph based on a picture book, Rascal used the reading selection from My Catholic Faith, and I assigned Captain three paragraphs from the CCC (You can download my document here.).
- Create St. Peter’s Basilica Pop-Up Book and add cover picture.
- Write a Paragraph about St. Peter’s Basilica.
Additional Activities:
- We made St. Peter’s Keys…
- Enjoyed “The Barque of Peter” Banana Boats with a Fishers of Men Snack for lunch one afternoon…
- Played St. Peter Fishers of Men and checked to see who could still master the Key Puzzle Brain Teaser our 2012 “O Key” Antiphon gift…
- Colored St. Peter and the Keys during some of our read aloud time…
- And added St. Peter, The First Pope to the History Through the Ages Record of Time. (FYI: Yes, this is a rather expensive timeline, but it is awesome! Each of our school age children have their own treasured copy that they will continue to add to throughout their education. It will be such a fun keepsake for them. I’ve posted more about these here and here.)
i love the lessons that include the entire family. very inspiring. i will have to settle to live vicariously through you for the time being. thank you for that blessing.
Thanks for much for posting your "lapbooking" endeavors – it sure does help to see how you are all creating it!!!
Watching Papa in the helicopter on his way to Castle Gondalfo now… Going to MISS Papa Benedetto!!!!!! I hope we are blessed with another humble and holy Papa as his successor!!
Once again, thank you for your posts. Somewhere in one of them you had the adopt a cardinal site. We went there as a family. If you have a minute, go over to my blog and read the post about it. You'll probably get a kick out of it.
My children and I really and truly appreciate all the time and effort you put into this blog and the wonderful ideas you give us. May God continue to bless you and your beautiful family.
I really like those timeline books too! We've decided that they will be something each child will be given when they reach 5th grade. I am so pleased with their quality and how they have the pages laid out.
Thanks for your peek into how you're putting together the lapbook in your home! We're going to start ours on Monday and I am going to spend some time planning and printing this afternoon/evening.
Jessica, do you sleep train your children? I know this is a very off-hand question, but I just don't understand how you accomplish so much in one day and one week! Does baby sleep through the night? Or is the schedule so set that it maximizes time and talent? Either way, it's all very beautiful and I pray for many blessings upon you all, as you have so blessed our home! Just looking for some pointers, though!
How did you make the tracing copywork? I use Startwrite on my computer to make copywork tracing, but I don't know that I could get it into another template… but how handy that would be if I could!
I have all the black and white pages printed and I am almost done sending the color pages to Staples to print… and it all looks wonderful! I am so excited. 🙂 I posted a little about how I'm breaking down the first unit on my blog, if anyone is interested. http://flareoflight.blogspot.com/2013/02/sede-vacante-and-papal-lapbook-plan.html
impressive.
Love the Papal lap books! Once again, I wish I was a student in your homeschool class! What a delightful way to learn! Your young ones are so blessed to have you as a mom!
I'm not exactly sure what you mean by sleep train, but I don't think so… My "baby" (who is now nearly 15 months) still wakes up wanting to nurse during the night (about half the time now, so he is getting better), and my schedule is not set whatsoever. I feel like I am able to get the most accomplished when we are able to be flexible, though I do try and use schedules as a guide/goal. But I do love love love my checklists! (and the big kids love their's too!)
I have a font on my computer! Love it!! 🙂
This is amazing!! Thank you so much for all you did!! You don{t need to reply to me, I just wanted to let you know I appreciate your time and creativity! We are doing your beautiful lapbook !!
I shared this post here:http://familiacatolica-org.blogspot.com/2013/03/imprimibles-en-ingles-y-actividades.html
Thank you Jessica! Thought you might like to see what we managed this week:)
http://sevenlittleaustralians.blogspot.com.au/2013/03/papal-notebook-thou-art-peter.html
actually we converted your lapbook into a notebook, as that works well for us. Thank you and God Bless!!{{}}
We are enjoying this activity SO MUCH, Jessica! Thank you for the guided updates you've been providing…and, once again, thank you—from the bottom of my heart—-for so GENEROUSLY sharing your time & talents with us! Words simply cannot express the gratitude I feel in my heart! God Bless you AND your beautiful family!
You are very welcome! I am so glad that everyone seems to be enjoying it!! 🙂
I love the St. Peter lesson ideas! I cannot seem to find the pop-up Basilica though. Is this available to download from your site? Thank you so much for your inspiring ideas and generous spirit! God Bless!
I somehow missed responding to this comment… You can find the link to the pop-up Basilica in this post or here on Scribd.
A lot of work you have put into this project Jessica! I love the pop up St. Peter's Basilica piece! Makes me want to go back climb the cupola again 🙂 Though finding a reason to return to Rome isn't hard! We have a coloring page of Jesus giving the keys to St. Peter if you are interested, I'll have to save some of these ideas for when the Feast of St. Peter and Paul come up! We will probably be making some unit studies in this area too to go with my husbands site… a history and geography saint's site, check out his map its pretty neat! http://www.alltheSaintsandPeterandPaul.com
The coloring page is here, scroll down the list to find the right one: http://www.sanctussimplicitus.com/life-of-the-soul.html
God bless!