I have been on a mission to add structure, routine, and tradition to our daily lives. It was fortuitous that I bumped into a new-to-me blog called Everyday Snapshots for she is currently writing a series called Living Liturgy to help us establish habits of faith at home.
I agree with her areas of importance and have decided to start there with my goal planning.
1. Prayer
2. Keeping Sunday
3. Education
4. Liturgical Year
My specific goals for each area (and I got a lot of inspiration from the blog above and the others who linked up in the comments):
1. Prayer
a) Pray the morning and evening prayers of the Liturgy of the Hours, alone for now, including the children once it is a habit for me.b) Use Children's Daily Prayers with the kids.c) Continue to pray our nightly decade of the rosary as a family, but make sure we include prayers "in our own words" as well.d) First Friday of the month adoration
2. Keeping Sunday
a) Mass attendance, obviously, and PSR for Bear. b) Something pleasant as a family to build memories and closeness. We love to go hiking and do nature walks but rarely fit them into our schedule. To me, the ultimate way to spend time with God is to be out in nature. c) Do minimal housework. I often end up using Sunday as a catch-up day, since my husband can play with the kids after Mass and this lets me tackle big tasks.
d) Do my school planning on Saturday, to keep Sunday more holy.
3. Education
I feel this is our strongest area already, so I will list what we do already.
a) study the Baltimore Catechism
b) daily Bible study and character study using (non Catholic) Long Story Short and Our 24 Family Ways.
c) memorize scripture weekly
d) read lots of saint stories
4. Liturgical Year
a) create traditions that are repeated year after year - we have some traditions around Advent (Saint Nicholas, Santa Lucia, and Our Lady of Guadeloupe), but I'd like to add special days throughout the year.
b) create a file organizer for the year of our coloring pages and activities for ease of repetition every year.
Looks like a great plan! We do much of the same. We enjoy the LTP daily prayer book. We like to use Shower of Roses blog for ideas on how to celebrate the liturgical year: http://showerofroses.blogspot.com/ For scripture memorization we use Memoria Press Christian Studies- very Catholic friendly. We don't use the workbook but after reading we do the questions orally (I have the teacher guide). We memorize the scripture form a Catholic bible and read in both the Golden's Children bible and regular bible. Instead of doing the workbook the kids write a summary of each lesson and draw. By the end of the program they will then have their own narrated picture bible. We use the beautifully illustrated Seton workbooks and Baltimore catechism for daily catechism study. Before the Seton workbooks we used the Angel Food readers with the catechism. You can find a schedule for using the readers here: http://4real.thenetsmith.com/forum_posts.asp?TID=24234&PN=1&TPN=1
ReplyDeleteThis is helpful! Thank you for your post. Prayer and Liturgical Year are our weakest areas
ReplyDeleteVery good post and very helpful for those of us just starting out with Catholic teachings at home. Thanks for the other blog and book recommendations too. :)
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