Saturday, March 1, 2025

March Radiant Roundup: The Month of St. Joseph and the Start of Lent

Here's a list of ideas to help you and your kids have a holy and purposeful Lent and Holy Week, as well as celebrate some of the important March Feast Days like St. Patrick and St. Joseph!


Feast of St. Katharine Drexel: March 3rd


The Season of Lent: Begins March 5th
Stations of the Cross:
Lenten Prayer, Fasting, Almsgiving:








Looking Ahead: Holy Week & The Sacred Triduum
Holy Week Family Retreat & Journal* (In English, Spanish, French, and Portuguese)
This post has ideas for each day of Holy Week, including a printable journal and clickable links to activities and videos.


Here's a list of great books for March:

And Stations of the Cross books for kids:

Saint Joseph, Guardian of the Holy Family, pray for us!
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March Books for Catholic Kids


March Catholic Kids Book List
Below are a few favorite titles that fit well with devotions and feast days this month! This list contains Amazon Affiliate links, which means if you click through and make a purchase, I earn a small commission at no cost to you. I'd also love to encourage you to shop directly with the publisher or with your local bookshop, or try to request these at your local library! I'm sure I've missed some books that would be great for this month, so feel free to add your own recommendations in the comments! You can find my giant list of Catholic Kid Books by topic here.

The Month of St. Joseph

Saint Feast Days this Month
3/3- St. Katharine Drexel

3/17- St. Patrick

3/19- St. Joseph
See list above

3/25- The Annunciation
Mary, the Mother of Jesus, Tomie de Paola

The Season of Lent

Books for Lent

Books with Lenten Themes- Salvation History & Life of Jesus
(While not specifically about Lent, these books help tell the story of why Jesus came to save us)


Books for Praying the Stations of the Cross with Kids
If you'd like to plan ahead:

Holy Week Stories

Book Lists By Month:
Click on the images below for book lists organized by feast days and devotions for each month:
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40 Intentions for 40 Days- Calendar for Lenten Prayer

You may have heard of the practice of praying for 40 people during the Lent, one person for each day of the season. I love the idea of this- what a great way to be intentional and specific with your Lenten prayer, fasting, and giving! Each day you can make sure to pray for that person, offer your Mass for them, send them a note or call them, or offer your fasting and sacrifices for them. As appropriate, you can also find ways to do almsgiving too, like dropping off a meal for a family with a new baby or donating to a charity in someone's honor or memory.

Even though I love this idea, I've never been able to successfully carry it out for the entirety of Lent... so I decided to make myself a calendar! This way I can plan out my intentions for Lent and hold myself accountable to praying for these people. I thought it might be something that you'd like to use with your family or classroom as well, since this is totally attainable for kids too! What a great thing to hang on the fridge or next to the family calendar for the entirety of Lent.

I set up this calendar with 40 spot to right names or intentions, including the Sacred Triduum but not counting Sundays, On Sundays, I suggest you pray for yourself or pray together for your immediate family, that you will more closely know, love, and serve the Lord. 

Need some ideas for your forty names?

  • grandparents
  • aunts & uncles
  • cousins
  • deceased members of your family
  • the pope
  • your bishop
  • your parish priest
  • seminarians from your diocese
  • teachers
  • classmates
  • coaches
  • teammates
  • friends and their families
  • godparents
  • family doctors
  • bosses & coworkers
  • babysitters
  • neighbors
Click here for a blank calendar (undated) that could be used year after year:

Or click here for one dated specifically for 2025:
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Saturday, February 22, 2025

The Chair of St. Peter- Free art prints

Today is the Feast of the Chair of St. Peter! No, it's really not just a celebration of a really old chair (although there is one within the sculpture behind Bernini's columns in St. Peter's Basilica). Rather it celebrates the authority of the Holy Father, our pope. You can read more about it here.

In honor of the feast, I'd like to share these two digital prints with you. I made them by carving the images in a block and then hand printing with ink. Both have an image of the dome of St. Peter's Basilica, one overlaid with the Holy Spirit as a dove, St. Peter's keys, and "Veni Sancte Spiritus" (Come Holy Spirit). I'd love for you to print and display one of these in your home or classroom as a reminder to pray for the Pope!

Click here for the version of the print with the overlaid symbols:


And click here for the version of the print with only St. Peter's dome:


If you haven't already downloaded them, here are a bunch of printables about the pope, perfect to use on this feast day:

And if you want to know more about the role of the pope, you might like my book We Have a Pope!

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Friday, February 21, 2025

40 Books for 40 Days- Lenten Book List for Catholic Kids


40 Books for 40 Days: Lenten Book List for Catholic Kids
Here's a new list of books for Catholic kids to read and pray with during the seasons of Lent.

This list contains Amazon Affiliate links, which means if you click through and make a purchase, I earn a small commission at no cost to you. I'd also love to encourage you to shop directly with the publisher or with your local bookshop, or try to request these at your local library! I'm sure I've missed some books that would be great for this topic, so feel free to add your own recommendations in the comments! You can find my giant list of Catholic Kid Books by topic here.

Books for Lent

Books with Lenten Themes- Salvation History & Life of Jesus
(While not specifically about Lent, these books help tell the story of why Jesus came to save us)


Books for Praying the Stations of the Cross with Kids
Holy Week Stories
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Wednesday, February 12, 2025

Allllllll the All about Lent & Holy Week Printables in one spot- FREE for you!

The Season of Lent is filled with so many rich traditions- I want to do my best as a teacher to share them with my students. This year I will definitely be putting this awesome pile of resources to good use in my classroom, and I'm so excited to share them with you too!

Shari Van Vranken of Catholic Paper Goods and I have collaborated make a huge collection of coloring and activities pages. Using the artwork and catechetical content from our book All about Lent & Holy Week: Sharing the Seasons of Repentance & Salvation with Children, we hope make the book more interactive this Season and for years to come. Even though Lent is still a few weeks away, we want to get them all in your hands NOW so that you can get ready- and we're offering them totally FREE!

We've compiled a collection of over twenty pages of printables for Lent, Holy Week, and Easter, including lots of coloring pages (with snippets of catechetical content to give them meaning), a simple Stations of the Cross booklet, a recipe for Lenten pretzels, a Holy Week mini poster, checklist with 40 ideas for the 40 days of Lent, and more!

You can access ALL THE RESOURCES IN THIS FOLDER

Or here is a list of the individual resources included. Each activity also has their own blog post with additional information and connected resources to help parents and teachers use them well. You can find the links to those posts below:

And all of them work perfectly alongside our book All about Lent & Holy Week: Sharing the Seasons of Repentance & Salvation with Children, which you can find at The St. Paul Center here or on Amazon here. 

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40 Ways for 40 Days- Printable checklist with doable items for kids & families!


In remembrance of Jesus’s forty days in the desert, each year the Church invites us into our own forty days of penance and preparation during Lent.

How can you pray, fast, and give this Lent? We’ve got a list of 40 ways you can grow in love of both God and neighbor during these holy forty days. Print out this list, hang it on your fridge and work on it as a family, or stick it in your Bible, planner, or journal to work on individually. Click here to download!

*Thanks to some generous readers, we now have this printable available in FIVE languages! Scroll to the bottom of the post to download in Spanish, French, Dutch, and German!

You can read more about prayer, fasting, and almsgiving in our new book All about Lent & Holy Week: Sharing the Seasons of Repentance & Salvation with Children. These resources were made in cooperation with Shari Van Vranken of Catholic Paper Goods using artwork from our new book!

You can find it at The St. Paul Center here or on Amazon here, or we'd love for you to ask for it at your local Catholic book store. It's also available as an ebook in both places if that's more your style! 


And you can find all of the free resources linked in this post:

 

Click here to download printable in Spanish:


Click here to download printable in French:


Click here to download printable in German:


Click here to download printable in Dutch:

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