Twelve Great Feasts

We're memorizing the 12 great feasts in church school, so I wrote this little poem to help. It can sort of be sung to the tune of the itsy bitsy spider.

JPG is full size, just grab and print at 100%.

Back to School with Calendar Printables (and other stuff)

We're back to school this week! I'm really grateful for a return to routine, oh yes, I am.

We've returned to a mostly Charlotte Mason style again this year, although we're keeping many elements of the Waldorf program we used last year. Its hard, really hard, to make all the choices about what and how to teach and to feel confident you've made the right decision. But I'm really appreciating Ambleside Online this year, and I'm feeling more and more confident that what we're doing works well for us.

Calendar Cards sitting on our kitchen corner shelf

Last year, I shared these feast day cards, and as I noted at the time I had forgotten a few important feasts. We moved our school work from upstairs to the kitchen table (which has been great), and suddenly our feast day cards have a nice place to sit and are much easier to see and remember. This has worked really well for us as a Church Year Calendar, and our whole family has enjoyed them beyond school time.

Initially I kept the extras in my teaching folder, but now the entire stacks sits on this corner shelf. I flip the card to the back when the feast/fast is passed to see what's coming up next (being mindful of moveable feasts and feast days in the middle of a fast). You can download the updated file here.  There are 40 cards: one for the 12 major feasts, many popular saints, and fasting periods. Each card includes the date of the feast and the troparion (or other relevant hymn for fasts). I printed mine through fed ex printing on nice card stock (and they even cut the pages for me).

We're enjoying our Dormition Fast printable, and looking forward to celebrating the feast this weekend with lots of flowers!

I made some new animal bookmarks (sea animals and horses) for my girls. You can find the animal bookmark printables on my craft blog.

Happy New School Year!

Church Year - Printable Wheel

Just in time for the church new year (and our first official year of homeschooling)! I have been wanting to make a church calendar for several years, and it finally seemed like the right time. I saw one somewhere, I think on the Antiochian website, but I'm having trouble finding it now (ah, here it is). But I really wanted to make one that could be used for more than just one year.

So I made a wheel, with adjustable parts. The moveable feasts are on the outer wheel, and the fixed feasts are on the middle wheel. The inner wheel has a circle for you to add your family's patron saints or other special days you remember, and then a circle for the months of the year and the seasons. I left the fixed feasts separate from the months/seasons so that it can be used with either the old or new calendar.

The feasts are color coded by the liturgical colors mostly (the weeks of preparation in the Triodion is light purple, although I'm not really sure what color is correct there), and the blocks of color are intended to span from the feast to its leavetaking. Pretty simple! At least, I hope. I'm not sure I got all the proportions right on the moveable feasts, those weeks are looking a bit big to me... I'll have to look at the calendar a bit and see, and if I make changes I'll post them here. Please let me know if you see any errors or think of any improvements - I'd love to make these really functional so it can be used for many years.

You can print it (cardstock is best), cut out, and assemble it either with a brad or on a bulletin board with a push pin. Download the printable below. And please do let me know what you think!