craft Archives - Catechist's Journey

Doing Arts and Crafts Projects in Short Class Times

Most catechists experience the crunch of time when teaching, knowing that they have a great deal of content to convey to their participants in a very short time. Sometimes, the notion of incorporating an arts and crafts project in a lesson just seems impossible given the time constraints! Thankfully, over the years, I’ve heard of a number of suggestions from catechists about how to accomplish this. Here are a few of their ideas: Provide children […]

Pop-Up Catechesis: Crafting Faith

Joe Paprocki

Did you realize that the Bible begins with a craft activity? The Creation stories of Genesis chapters one and two tell us that, out of the Divine imagination, God crafted the heavens and the earth, animals and plant life, night and day, oceans and sky, and human beings. That’s quite a craft activity! For this reason, crafts have always played a part in faith formation and deservedly so: when we craft something, we are imitating […]

Printable Saints Figures

Joe Paprocki

Celebrate the saints with our printable saints figures. Featuring art and saints from Finding God: Our Response to God’s Gift Kindergarten, these figures are a fun and simple project to color, cut, and fold. Here are a few ideas for how to use these saints figures: Display the finished figures on a classroom shelf or prayer table, or in the background for an online catechetical session. Fold the finished picture around a toilet paper tube […]

Rediscovering the Value of Crafts in Faith Formation

Joe Paprocki

As families find themselves spending more time together at home during the ongoing pandemic, parents and children alike are stretching their imaginative muscles to fill extra time on their hands due to canceled activities. Many parents are rediscovering the value of doing crafts, especially as a way to teach faith to their children. Too often dismissed as “fluff,” craft activities in religious education can serve as effective concrete expressions of the concepts being taught. They can […]

Arts and Crafts in the Classroom for the Non-Artist Catechist

Denise Gorss

Arts and crafts are not my specialty. I am upfront about this with my students, but I don’t want my lack of art skill to mean that we don’t have any artistic activities in our sessions. I certainly appreciate fine art. I have asked young people to draw pictures as responses to themes we’re discussing. And I do find some projects that I can lead that appeal to the artistic side of young people. What’s […]

Changing It Up with a Craft

Lisa Jones

It was the week when all the students in Texas had to take standardized tests. Even on a good day, my third-grade faith formation class is a squirmy bunch. After being at elementary school all day, doing nothing but taking standardized tests, I knew they would be extra squirmy. I needed to do something different to keep their attention this time. I wasn’t going to follow my regular class plan, so I needed a hands-on […]

When the Craft Is a Challenge

Lisa Jones

Crafts are an important part of any elementary faith formation program, and there are a multitude of great crafts that are perfect for our faith formation programs. After spending just a few minutes on Pinterest, I’m sure you’ll feel overwhelmed by the number of options. How do we select which crafts to use for our lessons? Sometimes, as a catechist in a parish, we might not even have a choice—the craft activity might be chosen […]

40 Ideas for 40 Days – Lenten Activities: Last Supper Craft

Joe Paprocki

This activity is called Last Supper Craft and comes to us from a Web site called Catholic Icing. It is ideal preparation for Holy Thursday and is based on Leonardo da Vinci’s Last Supper Painting. The nice thing is that Lacy, the host of the Web site, is kind enough to share her printables which make this craft possible. She has a nice tutorial that leads you step by step through creating this simple work […]