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%.

Great Lent Printables (Calendar, Lady Lent, and Services Cards)

I made some new printables for the kids at our church last week, and wanted to share.

First, is a new version of my older Lenten Calendar - the difference is that this one is made with cartoons I drew myself (and the previous one used the line drawings from the OCA education website), but also I made a second page with stamps of many of the other services of Lent. You can either paste them in to match your church's service schedule, or earn stamps as you attend services. I'm not sure how I'll use them this year, but here they are:





I drew a Lady Lent that includes the poem:

And finally I made these cards of services of Great Lent. I made these specifically to create a bulletin board for our church kids. I printed the first page (which has the Sunday's of Lent) full size, but I printed pages 2 and 3 at 50% so that the cards are smaller. Its basically a green winding path with the large Sunday cards spaced evenly throughout, and the smaller weekday cards inserted where they belong on the calendar. I also cut out a small black figure of Lady Sarakosti, and the children and I will move her along the path through Lent. 

You could probably come up with other uses for these cards - let me know if you do!

Bulletin board!

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!