St Francis of Assisi - Activities for Kids (October 4th) story & prayer

Hey friends. Okay, so today's video, I'm going to be talking about some really fun ways that we can celebrate St. Francis of Assisi, his feast day, which is coming up on October 4th. I have some really fun activities that I did with my kids and I wanted to share them with you in case you are looking for like some really fun ways to celebrate this amazing saint. St. Francis of Assisi is one of my favorite saints. He is so awesome. So if you are new here, please subscribe down below. Please hit the little bell button to get notifications every time I have a new video. My goal is to get out more videos. That is my goal. So we'll see if I can do that. So definitely hit the little bell button to know if I have more videos than just every Wednesday. And definitely share this video. If you have any mommy friends or mommy groups or grandmas that want to do some fun activities with their children, definitely share this video and let's get into it. So really quickly, St. Francis is amazing. So long story short, he came from a really wealthy family. He was really fun to be around, had lots of friends. He was very charismatic. And then he had a really big conversion and he pretty much gave everything to God. Like physically and just everything, materialism, everything. So he gave everything away and pretty much started an order. And this order at the time kind of rocked the world of the Catholic Church because St. Francis was not in the worldly way. It was not about riches or anything like that. He just wanted to serve God humbly with the poor and be poor of spirit. The Pope had a dream that pretty much St. Francis helped with the church, saved the church from crumbling and falling. So anyway, his story is so phenomenal. So if you're an adult watching this and you want to know more about St. Francis, there's this really awesome book. It's called The Little Flowers of St. Francis of Assisi. And it pretty much tells little stories of things that really happened while he was alive. It's really awesome. So anyway, I highly recommend this book. Anyway, I'll link that down below if you're curious about that book. But let's get into really fun things to do with our family, with our children to celebrate his feast day. So the first thing is he is really well known for a prayer called the St. Francis of Assisi prayer or St. Francis prayer. But the way that it goes is, Lord, make me an instrument of your peace. Where there is hatred, let me bring love and so on. So that is the prayer. I have it printed up. But if you want a copy of this, just go to my blog. I'll put it down below and you can just copy it right off and it's free. But yeah, help yourself. So that is a great way to start the celebration is through the St. Francis of Assisi prayer. Okay, so the next thing that I highly recommend is a scavenger hunt. So St. Francis of Assisi is really well known for kind of being like the outdoorsy guy. Like birds would flock to him. He loved animals. I thought it would be really fun to do like a scavenger hunt. So I actually went on Etsy and got this. And so I have two and they have different things on them. Don't feel like you need to go buy something. These were a couple dollars. I'll see if I can remember where I got them from and like put a link below. But you can always just write it out. Or you know, my kids are little so I wanted something with pictures. So pretty much what I did was I kind of split up my kids in two different groups. So I have five kids. So I put them in two different teams with two kids in each team. And it was great because I gave them a pencil and then they just kind of marked off what they saw. I gave them 20 minutes and whoever had the most in 20 minutes won. And they didn't win anything but it was just kind of fun to see them, you know, trying to find different things. And we went on different trails. They really enjoyed it. And so that's the first thing that I would recommend is doing something like that. Like a scavenger hunt. Something outdoorsy like that. Okay, so the next thing that I recommend to do, and I actually recommend doing this one first, is to build a church. And so the story is that St. Francis of Assisi, he felt like God was telling him to rebuild his church. And so there was a crumbled old church near town and so he physically started building up that church. It turns out God meant to rebuild the church, the whole church. And so I thought it would be really fun to build a church with my kids. So what I did was I got graham crackers out. I got white frosting. I got colored frostings and gels and colored sugar and just let the kids build a church out of all of that. So kind of like a gingerbread man house but a church. And that was the perfect time for us to kind of talk about St. Francis. So that's why I recommend doing this one first if you're going to do it. Because while they're working on it, you can talk about St. Francis and his story and why he was so amazing. Tell them about the different miracles that happened around him because there were so many. And just like his story, why he's a saint and why he's so awesome. Because these little stories really do help our children to form what is good and holy and what to do to please God. Anyway, that activity was so fun. The kids absolutely loved it. Okay, so another thing that we did was we made really, really simple easy bird feeders. So pretty much what you do is you slice up apples and you cut a hole in the middle. Like you kind of core it. And you put peanut butter on it really simply on both sides. And then what you do is you put bird seed on it. And so the bird seed will stick to it. What you'll do is you'll take some string or some ribbon and what you'll do is you'll kind of cut it long and you will go over to the tree and you'll just tie it on the tree. So it stays and it is actually super easy. The kids loved it. And it's a fun way to kind of get the birds involved because the story is that St. Francis, the birds loved him. Like all animals would flock to him. Little fun facts. You can tell your kids about that, how like the animals loved him, including the birds. Like they would come and like sit on his shoulder. That is another kind of fun, fun way to talk about St. Francis. So another kind of fun thing that you could do, if you don't really know the story of St. Francis, you know, while they're building the little church, you could always put on a video for them. So I have this video. It's really cute and good. I'll link it down below, but don't feel like you have to buy anything. There are actually so many, if you go on YouTube, if you look up St. Francis of Assisi, there's so many cute little cartoon videos. So you could have them like watch one of those, like maybe on your iPad or something like that while they're building the churches. So they're kind of listening while they're building. And that's another way that you could do it. And you, I find a lot of really cool things about the saints when I let my kids do that. So there's one called, what is it? Like Christian TV for kids, I think. I'll link up down below, like couple ideas if you're looking for some, but super cute. And those are free. So I highly recommend like just letting them to have that, like those little videos, because those are teachable moments too. Okay. So another thing that we did is we had a dance party. So it is said that St. Francis of Assisi loved dancing. And so I have this little speaker that I begged my husband for. I love this thing. Anyway, it has really good sound. And what you can do is like have a little dance party. Like my kids love dancing. Like when it rains out, we don't know what to do. We have a dance party and the kids go crazy. So we'll go down in the basement and we will dance. And it's so fun. And sometimes my kids, like I'll be busy and they're like, mom, can I borrow your speaker? Like can we have a dance party? Like my kids love dancing. And I'm like, sure. Like I have like little playlists that they can like listen to and all of that. So anyway, so that's an idea. Like my kids love dancing. If your kids love dancing, like say, hey, you know, cool, fun fact, St. Francis of Assisi loved dancing. Let's go have a dance party. And another thing that you could do is go to the zoo. So he loved animals. So this would be a great time to like go to the zoo. I know not everybody has access to a zoo, but if you're like a homeschooler, like maybe you could make a day of it and go to a zoo and get to talk about St. Francis. That'd be kind of cool. Some people, you could build little, you know, zoo animals and stuff out of clay or Play-Doh or whatever. So that's just another fun idea. Another thing is my daughter collects rocks. She loves rocks. She has her whole life. Little fun fact about Bella, but a fun thing you could do if you have like some round rocks is you could paint them and like have little, you know, do little ladybugs or make little animals out of them. I think that would be really, really fun to do too. We did not have time nor I didn't have, you know, everything we needed for that, but that would be really fun to do. So anyway, so those are some ideas of like celebrating St. Francis of Assisi. He is so awesome. He is truly one of my favorite saints because he just wanted to do what God wanted him to do. Like the world at first thought he was crazy for like the way that he lived his life, but he didn't care. He loved God so much that he kind of didn't care. And when you love God so much, you kind of don't care. You just want to like please him and do the right thing. So anyway, so these are some ideas. I hope that you enjoyed this video. Give this a thumbs up and until next time, I will see you all later. God bless. Bye.