Next weekend, our parish is hosting a Holy Hour for Life service.
This past week when I was on the USCCB site to do my daily readings, I noticed their Nine Days for Life novena and printables.
Thus, I was inspired to add to the Count, Pray and Give sheets that I had made for my children's Advent and Christmas homeschool studies and to offer them as a free set here.
In this set, you will find a five different options:
- one for a 31-day month
- one for a 30-day month
- one for a 28-day month
- one for a 24-day Advent
- one for the 12 days of Christmas.
Using Count, Pray and Give is super-easy.
Simply have your children choose a different thing in your home to count each day. Encourage them to pick things like windows or doors when they need to get out their wiggles by running around. Try small items that you can set out on a table for times when your children could use some seated concentration or fine motor work.
After counting, together, make up a prayer that connects whatever they counted to babies. For example, when my children counted "big bowls", they thanked God for all the food we have to fill our big bowls and prayed that all babies would have enough to eat.
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Next, ask your children to record the name and number of items. The name of the item can be written in printing or cursive, depending on what your child is working on. Likewise, the number can be written as a numeral, a number work or with tally marks. Depending on what other math skills your child is working on, you can also do simple arithmetic and word problems in connection with the recorded counts.
Finally, pray the prayer written on the sheets and have your child place coins or bills equal in value to the number of items they counted in a donation container. If you are still working on coin and dollar value amounts, you may wish to have your child empty the container occasionally to "trade up" the coins and bills in it for ones of higher values.
Consider Running a Spare Change - Spare A Life Campaign
If your parish, local homeschool group or other community group would be willing, you could connect your own Count, Pray and Give activities with a Spare Change Campaign. Our church's Respect Life Committee sponsored such a campaign throughout this past December and early January, which is what inspired us to revisit our Lenten Count, Pray and Give, revising it for the season. I am so glad they did!
More Resources
- Five Great Books for Pro-Life Preschoolers links to five books my children enjoy.
- Why I Give by Corine Hyman is an anytime-of-year e-activity book for children about giving.
- The Altar Gang's Skif and AJ's Fantastic Voyage is one of my children's favorite videos.
How do you and the children in your life engage in encouraging Respect for Life?
(If you receive this post via email and cannot see the linky, be sure to actually click over to the blog to read browse the rich catalog of ideas there.)
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