Rosary Hopscotch

With Emma being in school now, I have been extra motivated to get organized myself. For instance, I had so much fun going school supply shopping, I felt like I was 10 again. I started filling our cart with pencils and crayons and markers and erasers and watercolor paint. Then I remembered that the only school supply Emma needed was a book bag. Darn. But I still bought all of those things anyway. So now that I have these supplies I am determined to use them here at home with the kids.

When it comes to crafts, I usually copy ideas that I find online. I like to be creative, but I find that with my "mom brain" I am not often that original.
One day I was playing hopscotch with Emma and I had an idea of using a similar format for teaching my kids to pray the rosary. Being a catechetics major, I am all about trying to find fun and creative ways to teach my children the faith.



So I pulled together a white paper roll, paint, and brushes. I printed off 10 small pictures of Mary, one of the Holy Trinity, and one of God the Father. Then we got to work. We rolled out the banner paper and I outlined one decade of the rosary and then the kids helped me paint in the beads (or circles). We glued the pictures next to each bead to help teach them which prayer comes next. There were moments where I wished I had waited to do this project until they were asleep, but then I reminded myself that the messy marks are what makes it beautiful and then they are proud of what they had done. Once we were finally done painting and I still had some hair left, I set it out to dry. When it was dry I covered it with laminate(this was the most expensive part of the project, but I think it will be worth it in the end).

When Dan got home that night, the kids were so excited to show him what we had done and then we prayed together. The kids held their rosaries and and after each Hail Mary they would move their fingers to the next bead and jump onto the next circle. I keep saying "they" but in reality, Emma does all of this and Kolbe sometimes follows and sometimes just runs or rolls around(the laminate was def. worth it) But that's great. He has fun and he randomly copies the prayers that we say.

So there you have it. A Johnson family craft that will hopefully turn into a fun little tradition. So far so good. ;)