Celebrate (and Learn!) with St. Mark

This past week began with Saint Mark's Feast day, which meant more faith through food, fun, and a bit of themed "study" for us.

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None of my sleepyheads woke up in time to join me for Mass in the morning nor to help me prepare our simple feast day breakfast table.  However, they did wake to a winged lion vegetable plate for breakfast.

Since St. Mark's symbol is a winged lion, I decided to make a veggie-and-dip lion with romaine lettuce wings for breakfast.  I also put our red, yellow, and white candles, and opened our Picture Book of Catholic Saints to the Saint Mark page.

Then, over breakfast and beyond, the children and I enjoyed the following faith, fun, and learning activities.

Prayer

As well as grace, we prayed this prayer:

O Glorious St. Mark, through the grace of God our Father, you became a great Evangelist, preaching the Good News of Christ. May you help us to know Him well so that we may faithfully live our lives as followers of Christ. Amen.

We also read the Bible readings for the day from the USCCB site and chatted about what stood out to each of us.

English Language Arts

We listened to a short biography about Saint Mark on American Catholic.org, chatted about it, and read about St. Mark in the Picture Book of Catholic Saints.
 
Using notes from Saint Mark Parish's page, our winged lion veggie-and-dip platter, and images I had printed out and put on our candles, we also talked about the about the symbolism of the winged lion symbol for St. Mark.

Further, I read the children quotes related to St. Mark from All Great Quotes and, then, concluded with these two quotes:  

Go ye into the whole world, and preach the gospel to every creature. ~ Mark 16:15

For what shall it profit a man, if he gain the whole world, and suffer the loss of his soul? ~ Mark 8:36

I asked each of my children to pick one of these quotes to use for copywork, and wrote each child's chosen quote out neatly for him or her to copy.

For spelling, I challenged the children to come up with as many words as they could within five minutes from the words "Saint Mark the Evangelist".  In doing so, they had to pay attention to which letters were capitals and which were not, using capital letters properly.

Plus, since we had recently been learning about nouns and adjective, for grammar, we brainstormed common and proper nouns that had to do with Saint Mark and then came up with different adjectives that could be used to describe them.

Arts and Crafts

We gently studied a few icons and images of St. Mark that I brought up on our laptop or printed out in miniature and put on our candles.

I plan to follow up with a deeper study of art in future years using notes from this page I found as well as other resources I might find.  (Your suggestions are welcome!)

The children also chose to color some images I had printed out from online and/or to draw their own winged lions using instructions on how to draw a lion from Draw Write Now as a guide.  T
These children's artwork along with their copywork and some printed images, were glued onto cardstock to make pages for their faith binders.

Geography

On a map and small globe, we located places that were mentioned in the Saint Mark biographies that we read and listened to.

Math

Some of my kiddoes are still working on days and dates, so we all wrote April 25, 2016 in three different ways on white boards.

We also used story math to figure out about how long ago St. Mark lived.

For fun, we used Cuisenaire Rods to make 25 equations with the number 25 in them, since St. Mark's Day is April 25, and this activity could be scaffolded to each child's math level.

What a faith-centered, fun, and fruit-filled morning our St. Mark feast day study proved to be!

Which saints will you be celebrating soon?  How do you integrate celebration into learning, meal time, or the rest of life?  Do share.