Free Ash Wednesday Coloring Page [New Printable]

"During this Lent then, brothers and sisters, let us all ask the Lord, 'Fac cor nostrum secundum cor tuum (make our hearts like yours).'" (Pope Francis)

After reading the above in Pope Francis's Lenten message for 2015, I found myself drawing some praying people and pondering the words.

So, on this eve of Ash Wednesday, I wanted to share a free Ash Wednesday coloring page with you. (Click here or on the image for the full-size free downloadable coloring page.)

Please feel free to make as many copies as you need for your home or parish, but do not use it for profit or derivative work. Play nicely.

The Lenten Coloring and Activity Book--Available Now!

Ready for Lent? My Lenten Coloring and Activity Book is now available at my Etsy Shop for just $8.

The 35-page PDF is packed with 28 coloring pages and activities, all in ONE place, to help you during the Lenten journey.

The Lent Coloring Book features...

Coloring Pages for every Sunday in Lent:

• 1st Sunday of Lent
• 2nd Sunday of Lent
• 3rd Sunday of Lent
• 4th Sunday of Lent
• 5th Sunday of Lent
• Palm Sunday
• Good Friday
• Easter Sunday

Activities:

• Bookmarks
• Crown of Thorns Coloring Activity
• Flowers for the Crown of Thorns Activity
• Journal Page Cover
• Journal Page Cross
• Journal Page Candle
• Prayer Jar Label
• Prayer Jar Strips

12 Stations of the Cross

Just visit the Paper Dali shop on Etsy to purchase this digital file. Once you do, you can download it immediately. (Who doesn't love easy-peasy purchases?)

Lent 2011

Lent begins tomorrow on Ash Wednesday. It is the season for emptying ourselves of the smaller things for the sake of the greatness of God's love and grace. The forty days are not just a journey in itself, but one hopes that the progress we make in growing closer to the Lord continues long past Easter.

For Lent, I've a few posts to share with you, my friends:

• Make the Lenten Journey With Your Child are my notes from a talk I gave to parents whose children are in my parish's Faith Formation program.
• The Portable Stations of the Cross craft is a favorite at our home. It can be difficult to get to the Church for this holy tradition ... so we sometimes do this at the park with friends or around our home.
• The Prayer Jar printables are a super-simple way to incorporate more prayer during this holy season. All you need is a printer, scissors, and a jar.

May this season be one filled with more opportunities for reflection and prayer for all of us.

Blessings,

Vee

Making the Lenten Journey With Your Child

Just as we prepare for Christmas by setting aside days for certain activities, programs, and crafts, we need to make preparations for the greatest holy day for Christians: Easter. Lent gives us 40 days of preparation and enables us to journey with the Lord through His last days as He prepared Himself for the fulfillment of His mission.

And Lent truly is a journey. It is not something that we check off days for Easter or think just about the outcome. It is something participatory, something to be experienced. Likewise, as we makes plans to celebrate Lent, let us remember that we are to experience it together, as a family. It is not something to do for the kids, but a journey to take together.

The following are a few tips for making the Lenten journey.

Learn about Lent together. Children imitate what they see. Read about what Lent is---and even if you know, refresh your memory!---and share what you’ve learned while having dinner as a family.

Have your home reflect the Catholic Church during the Lenten season. Make an effort to add purple to your house. You can use purple tablecloths or napkins, even lights. Consider toning down the noise and the visual distractions in your home, too.

Create a prayer corner. If you don’t have one, consider making one. We all have special places in the house to eat, to read, to play. And yes, we can do all those things in different parts of the house. But in setting aside special places, it makes the task itself special. A prayer corner doesn’t have to be fancy. In our house, it is the top of a bookshelf. We cleared it from books and just have a crucifix, a statue of Mary, some holy cards and a Bible. For liturgical seasons, we have cloths of special colors to put on it. They’re not fancy clothes, just a place mat bought for $1.99 at Anna’s Linens, but it matches the color of everything at Mass. And it’s important for the Mass to be something that is lived and experienced as a family, not something that we just go to once a week.

Make a Lenten calendar. Use the idea of an Advent calendar. Create a calendar with 40 days. The journey begins with Ash Wednesday and continues through to Holy Week. Use pictures of the desert to decorate it. For Monday through Saturday, have a dry spot. For Sundays, use an oasis to show that this is our break in the desert during Lent. Have the calendar go to Holy Thursday, Good Friday and then Holy Saturday. On the back of the calendar, draw or color or paste a huge picture of Easter. My kids have used pictures of themselves, a holy card, even an image of a camel, to mark their spot along the Lenten journey.

Make a Prayer Jar. Use a nice clear jar for the family to record our prayer journey through Lent. Have different colored strips in different plastic bags on hand, so the child/parent can just pull a strip and write on it. Color ideas are: purple (intercessions), pink (praise), green (thanks), yellow (petition), blue (adoration) and white (combination). Every time someone says a prayer, s/he writes it down and puts in the prayer jar. It's a nice way to get the children (and grown-ups) to be aware of the different sorts of prayer ... and how often they pray.

Make a prayer journal.Use heavy card stock and old magazines for the kids to make a cover for a prayer journal. Then just fold paper in half and staple it inside for the pages. Every night, during the Scripture reading, the kids can either cut pictures for a collage entry in their journal or draw one. Remember that the journal is one created by the family, and there are no rules for who gets to be in the book.

For our journal, which is just a three-ring binder with plain pages in it, our kids have put pictures of everyone from Jeff Corwin (the host of a nature show and famous herpetologist) to Tim Duncan, the center of the San Antonio Spurs, to the pope to the president to Brett Favre, quarterback of the Jets. They also cut out pictures of friends and family members and added those to the book. We play the book in the prayer corner, so they can just pick it up and pray for the people in it. It’s a great visual and hands-on way to pray.

Pray the Stations of the Cross as a family. You can use a children’s book, the ETWN Website (www.ewtn) or make your own. (I've included some in my Lenten activity book here.)

Read Lenten books together. You can either get them from Amazon or check out the library or a Catholic bookstore. For example, you can get: The Tale of Three Trees, Children's Stations of the Cross, The Giving Tree, and The Very First Easter.

Watch a Christian movie together. For example, you can rent “The Gospel of John” or “Jesus of Nazareth” and just watch 10 minutes at night and then discuss it as a family. My kids are partial to “The Gospel of John” because it had a narrator, who read the Gospel, as the scene unfurled on the screen. Plus, the Jesus in it is very friendly, youthful and vibrant. My kids kept commenting how they wanted to go hang out with him, and in all honesty, it made me feel that way, too.

Make pretzels. Really! There is even a prayer attached to it:
We beg you, O Lord, to bless these breads which are to remind us that Lent is a sacred season of penance and prayer. For this very reason, the early Christians started the custom of making these breads in the form of arms crossed in prayer. Thus they kept the holy purpose of Lent alive in their hearts from day to day, and increased in their souls the love of Christ, even unto death, if necessary.

Grant us, we pray, that we too, may be reminded by the daily sight of these pretzels to observe the holy season of Lent with true devotion and great spiritual fruit. We ask this through Christ our Lord. Amen.
--With ecclesiastical approbation.

Portable Stations of the Cross

When our moms' group talked about having Stations of the Cross at the park, I had to do some Serious Thinking. We didn't have enough trees spaced out for Stations. Nor did we have any structure that we could tape/nail/glue/affix our Stations.

Then I came up with this:

These metal garden stakes were perfect for presenting a Station, and we've been able to tote them to different parks, have the children set them up by sticking them into the ground, and then ... praying!


Materials:

• pictures for each station (I downloaded the free set from The Bookworm, a longtime favorite blogger of mine.)
• sticky back foam sheets
• popsicle sticks
• glue
• metal garden markers (You can get these from your local garden-supply shop.)

Steps
These may be obvious, but there's no harm in explaining it, right?

1.  Print and cut the Stations.
2. Cut the sticky foam sheet in half.
3. Glue a Station to one half of the sticky foam sheet.
4. Lay one cut piece of the sticky foam sheet underneath the garden marker.
5. Place the other half on top of it. This puts the two parts together, one with the picture, one without. And it seals it in nicely, so the Station plate doesn't slide around.
6. Make a cross with the popsicle sticks.
7. Glue the cross to the top.
8. Pray!

For more ideas on celebrating Lent, visit the great blogs at Catholic Icing's Lent Link Up.

Blessings,

Prayer Jar

Instead of just writing down a petition for our Lenten prayer jar, I decided to draw the little petitions. Each strip has a picture and the beginning of a prayer for a child (or adult, actually) to finish. To enjoy, just download the page, cut along the dotted line, put them in a jar, and then put it in an accessible spot. During Lent, a child (or adult) can take out a strip during breakfast and begin the day with a prayer.