The Feast of the Epiphany

The Happiest Search

Our first week back after a wonderful Christmas break was spent celebrating the manifestation of the Lord with the Feast of the Epiphany.  We prepared for this feast day with all sorts of fun crafts, stories and songs. 

We started with our atrium Infancy Narrative box to tell the story of the three kings.  This led us to a fun art project that introduced two interesting, new concepts:

symmetry and silhouettes

Everyone cut a silhouette of one of the wise men on a camel (which was quite a challenge).  After adding it to black paper, the munchkins used "royal jewels" to create a symmetrical design around the border.  They were beautiful!

Each afternoon of this week we had fun singing the crazy Christmas song The Twelve Days of Christmas.  Even more interesting, though, was to dig deep into the real meaning of the song.  We created an amazing lapbook filled with the hidden meanings of each of the twelve gifts given by the "true love" (after discussing who that True Love is).

The munchkins worked so hard on the lapbook.  There was so much cutting, folding, gluing, coloring and especially...following directions!  It was a huge task and helped develop so many different skills. 

Plus, it was just fantastic when it was completed.  I think every little munchkin commented on how they couldn't wait to show Mom and Dad!

This mini-unit gave us the chance to practice our writing skills too.  The munchkins wrote their own books titled Kings.  The sight word "here" was our main focus, as well as using the special ending "ing".  Considering we had been out of school for two whole weeks, the munchkins did a wonderful job remembering all the conventions of sentence writing.

Here's just a sample.

They were very proud of their finished books...as well they should be.

We ended our week with one last fun project.  The munchkins created the setting and character pieces to retell the story of the visit from the Magi.  

Probably the most fun was the fact that the character pieces were little finger puppets and the setting could stand up on its own!

In all, we had a great first week of January and a great first week on the new year.  

Until next time...

Giggles,
Mrs. D.