Free Printable Catholic Lenten coloring pages, Bible activities, Christian crafts

Hello my Omschool friends. Our family is Catholic and when I homeschooled our children, we followed the liturgical calendar and based our lesson plans around that. Our high holy day is Easter. For Catholic and Orthodox Christians, Easter is about more than just Easter baskets, bunnies and candy. Easter celebrates the Passion, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. During Lent, which is the 40-day period prior to Easter, Christians ready themselves for Jesus's coming with prayer, fasting and almsgiving. Lent begins in the Catholic liturgical calendar, on Ash Wednesday, following Fat Tuesday or Mardi Gras (also called Shrove Tuesday) The date of Ash Wednesday changes each year as Easter is a "movable feast." In 2025, Ash Wednesday was Mar 5.  

Lent "follows" Jesus's during forty days of fasting in the desert when He was tempted by Satan. in preparation for His sacrifice on the cross. During Lent, we try to imitate Jesus. We follow the "Way of the Cross" or Stations of the Cross and pray the rosary. To help children learn about their Catholic Christian faith and observe Lent, here are free printable stations of the cross, rosary, saints and Easter bible story coloring pages. Use these for Lenten devotions.

The Catholic Kid has dozens of free printable Catholic coloring pages for Lent. There are free printable Catholic saints coloring pages too. 

Catholic Mom has an entire liturgical year of free downloadable and printable saints feast day coloring pages organized by month. This site also has 200+ free printable Sunday mass worksheets and activities, gospel Bible story coloring pages and devotional guides that follow the Catholic liturgical calendar. 

St. Anne's Helper has free printable Catholic activities and coloring pages for Lenten devotions. Catholic Icing is a homeschool mom blog with all kinds of printable Catholic activities, games, crafts, lesson plans and coloring pages. Clip Art Library has even more Catholic Bible printables and religious coloring pages. Edupics also has a big assortment of free printable Christian coloring pages. 

Between these sites, you'll free printable and downloadable Catholic Lenten coloring pages across all categories related to the faith, plus Christian games, activities, crafts and lesson plans. Some images are cartoons but others are beautifully drawn stained glass windows in various churches. These would make good adult coloring pages as well as challenging coloring pages for kids.  Categories include: 

free printable rosary coloring pages--Joyful Mysteries from the Bible story of Jesus's life: the annunciation, the Visitation, the Birth of Jesus, the Presentation and Finding the Child Jesus in the Temple--Sorrowful Mysteries from the Bible story of Jesus's life: the Agony in the Garden, the Scourging, the Crowning with Thorns, Carrying the Cross and the Crucifixion--Glorious Mysteries (heavenly events) in Jesus's life include the Resurrection, the Ascension, the Descent of the Holy Spirit, the Assumption and the Crowning of Mary Queen of Heaven.--Luminous Mysteries: the Baptism of Jesus, the Wedding at Cana (Jesus's first public miracle), the Proclamation of the Kingdom and the Institution of the Holy Eucharist. These are Bible events from the life of Jesus. 

free printable Stations of the Cross coloring pages, one for each of the 15 stations

free printable Apostles Creed coloring pages

free saints coloring pages of St. Patrick, Mary Mother of God, St. Joan of Arc, St. Philomena, St. Tarcisius, St. Clare, St. Maximilian Kolbe, St. Joseph, St. Francis of Assisi, St. Valentine and other saints. There are several of Pope Francis. 

Use these free printable Catholic Easter coloring pages for Ash Wednesday, Lent devotions, Holy Week, Palm Sunday and the Easter Triduum: Holy Thursday, Good Friday, Holy Saturday and finally Easter Sunday. Make a Stations of the Cross coloring book for mass and to keep little ones quiet during devotions and to reflect during your stations prayers. These coloring pages make great lent devotional activities to prepare children for Easter.

Kids books and children's TV shows about broken bones, hospitals and childhood injuries

Hello my friends of the Omschool (omi-grama school). I'm worried today because my sweet 4 y/o grandson broke his leg on a trampoline a few days ago. Poor little guy is going to be in a wheelchair and cast for quite awhile.  And you know what this Omi does whenever anyone is in crisis. First I pray then I turn to bibliotherapy to find solace. So my first thought was hunt up books to help little man cope. Here are books about injured kids, hospital stays and all that goes into mending a broken leg.

Number one and two have got to be Curious George Takes a Job and Curious George Goes to the Hospital (H.A. and Margaret Rey) First, I like that in both cases, the injuries were preventable if George had listened and not been so snoopy. It normalizes what is very normal child behavior. A child's mishaps are often his own or someone else's "fault" in that they were playing too roughly, not following directions, etc. They (or the other person) may feel guilty and ashamed but can take comfort that they're not alone. Everyone makes mistakes and can learn from them. Kids will find it interesting to see what hospitals were like, with children's wards instead of private rooms, and how injuries were treated (broken legs in traction) years ago--in Omi's time! Hopefully there won't be an open ether bottle though! 

I Broke My Trunk (Mo Willems) Poor elephant has bent his proboscis and tells a silly story of how it happened. You'll love this one for the funny pictures alone!  

Sammy's Broken Leg (Oh No!) and the Amazing Cast that Healed It (Judith Wolf Mandell) This book will resonate with any child who's been in a cast all summer and has to deal with boredom, annoyance, being left out of activities and other frustrations. A little cheesy but I think kids will love it! 

Arthur's Knee isn't a book that I know of but a episode of the TV series Arthur. Our adventurous aardvark disobeys and goes to a junkyard. Predictably, he gets hurt and learns a lot about the body and how it heals itself. You can watch Arthur free with PBSKids subscription. Some episodes are available on Youtube and Amazon Prime. 

Caillou suffers his share of injuries and learns how to ask for help and how his body works. Here's another one about summer injuries. 

Daniel Feels Better In this episode of Daniel Tiger's Neighborhood, Daniel hurts his ankle and learns about how doctors help children with injuries and how an x-ray works. 

Use these resources to help children understand why and how accidents happen and cheer them when they do. 

 

A case against censorship: See You at the Library is not American, Constitutional or Biblical

 Hello my friends of the Omschool. I know, I know, I just wrote a pro-censorship post and now I'm contradicting myself with an anti-censorship one. So the first one was actually not so much in favor of censorship as delaying children reading books books that aren't age-appropriate, aka books that are too mature. Today I'm taking on full-out censorship, banning books and the See You at the Library initiatives.

When Kirk Cameron (yes the child actor) initiated his "See You At the Library" thing last year, his proclaimed intent didn't match his true agenda. His mission is supposedly to return to American, Constitutional and Bible values. It was really a hostile takeover of libraries. They didn't want a meeting room like anyone else using the library would be given. They demanded to read in the library proper where everyone was forced to listen to readings of their fundamentalist books. 

As a person who treasures the sanctity and QUIET of the library, I'd be opposed for this reason alone! Supposedly this was an alternative to "drag queen story hours" (the ignorance baffles). My children have enjoyed many events at the library and never once was there an agenda besides learning to love reading. So as a person and a parent who treasures her civil liberties, I would not want my children being proselytized at story hour. By any one of any persuasion.  But that's not all they did. 

They further wanted a shelf purge of anything that didn't fit with their narrow definition of appropriate literature. AND librarians were to be punished and fired if said books were left on shelves. This is the kind of slippery slope mentality that led to book burning in Nazi Germany, just saying. These advocates don't just want freedom to read what they want, they want you not to be free to read what you want. 

Why am I so vehement about this? Because it violates the American, Constitutional and Bible values they supposedly promote. American values are all about being able to worship as we choose (or don't choose). We are protected against state religions and enforced observances. We believe in separation of church and state.  I'm a Catholic but I don't want mandated prayer, Bible reading etc. That destroys the purpose which should be done is secret and from the heart. And, make no mistake, fundamentalists like these have no use for any religious observance other than their own, despite the fact that it predates theirs by 1,900 years. 

Our constitution promises freedom of speech and the press. The American Library System is the backbone and bastion of that freedom. The Bible is all about diversity, inclusion and equality. Jesus abhorred hatred, shaming, judgementalism, hypocrisy and double standards. He railed against Pharisees and the self-righteous. 

I call this "Make America Stupid Again." 

As a homeschool parent, I knew a fair number of other parents who 

Late Boomer Teen and Kids Books that earlier boomers, Gen Y and Z don't understand

Hello my friends of the Omschool. March is National Reading Month and also Women's History Month. I've been writing a lot about books with flawed but relatable girl heroes from my boomer childhood (late 60s into 70s) These characters are often misunderstood and seem very broken, which is what resonated with me and maybe a lot of girls my age. What I realize, reading reviews from clearly younger people, is that these stories don't translate well with Gen Y and Z and maybe not even Gen X. 

Interestingly enough, they don't make sense to earlier boomers either who were raised on Pollyanna and Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm. It seems we, the last of  the late, great boomers are the only ones that get these characters. That's because our youth and teen time was very different than any before or after us. 

Let's take for example, the book Me Too by Vera and Bill Cleaver. A 12 y/o girl is abandoned by father and essentially mother, to care for her developmentally disabled (called retarded back then) sister Lorna. She tries to "make Lorna smart" to win back father. This book often gets low reviews, venomous actually, for being unrealistic and because the main character (sorry I've forgotten her name) is so angry with her sister. 

But from the perspective of a kid then and now, if we're honest, it's absolutely believable. Fathers (and mothers) do abandon families. Mine did. And moms (and dads) are often absent. Mine were. Parents did leave their oldest kids to basically raise their siblings. Mine did. And while my situation was quite unusual comparatively speaking (and maybe why I appreciated this book so much), I know others could relate as well. 

And the older sister who gets all the venom, was the most believable of all. She was hurt that her family was shattered, resented her sister for ruining her life, angry with her parents for not taking care of her or Lorna and just mad at life in general for dealing her such a rotten hand. Now you tell me what generation of adolescents hasn't felt these things and for fewer reasons than this character has. 

Reviewers faulted her for blaming her sister, calling her names and hating her, but also for, politically incorrectly, trying to make her normal. Now, to begin with, a kid shouldn't be left to care for their sibling alone, especially not one with special needs. And if they are, they're going to make mistakes and get it wrong because they are KIDS. I find it interesting how we don't fault parents for parentifying their child and then blame the child for failing to be the adults that the adults are unwilling to be.

And trying to normalize her sister, calling her names, punishing her is exactly what normal teens would do. THAT is realistic. Hurtful? Sure. Sometimes mean, yep. Misguided, absolutely. She had none of the parental guidance she should have had. Life is not a Hardy Boys novel. And most girls or people aren't Nancy Drew with her perfect piety and smug saintliness. We bumble and stumble. 

One reviewer scalded  the book for not having a happy ending. (so read the Bobbsey Twins) And that's what I like about the book! My life has never had neat, tidy conclusions either. Another faulted her for using God's name in vain and for having "janky" ideas of Christianity. So sanctimoniousness aside, A lot of us in that time were questioning the hypocrisy of organized religion, being raised to do things that weren't modelled for us. And if the character had wrong ideas, it was because she was showed a janky version. She was being made to carry heavy burdens the "Christians" weren't helping carry. 

I confess I'm surprised at the vituperative attitude toward this book and others like it from Gen X, Y and Z. I expected it from older generations who tended not to understand kids of the 70s. How often did we hear "things were different in my generation!" They certainly were and now we're having to deal with the fallout of all that. So cut us some slack! 

But I didn't expect to read such scathing criticism from younger, self-professed enlightened people. It is shows how differently kids are now raised and that closemindedness is not the purview of older people alone. It never ceases to amaze me how insular people can be. They see things only through the lens of their own experience, social norms and constructs.  They pass judgement on people who have not lived in their reality. They hold past people accountable to now expectations. 

So where was I going with this? It gets back to my earlier post that to understand books from another time and place we have to understand the time and place it was written. We have to  drop preconceived notions and leave off judging what we didn't live and seek to understand cultural, and time period differences. 

There are so many examples of late boomer teen and kids books and plays that older boomers, Gen Y and Z don't understand. Some of these teen angst stories from the 50s were censored and banned: 

West Side Story (Jerome Robbins play)

Lord of the Flies (William Golding)

Rebel Without a Cause (film by Nicholas Ray)

Catcher in the Rye (J. D. Salinger)

The Wild One  (Lazlo Benedek film),

Cross and the Switchblade, Purple Violet Squish (and others by David Wilkerson co-authored with John and Elisabeth Sherril) 

Run, Baby, Run (Nicky Cruz)

From the 60s and 70s, the Bill and Vera Cleaver book Where the Lilies Bloom. M.E.Kerr's Dinky Hocker Shoots Smack, The Outsiders (an all of S.E. Hinton's books), Judy Blume books, The Pigman (and others by Paul Zindel). 

The only play/movie that I know of that dealt with troubled teens prior to this was the Dead End (1934) a fictionalized account of the Bowery Boys (Dead End kids). The characters are often considered unbelievable, 2D, archetypal or anachronistic by younger readers. Older boomers criticized them for showing kids as angry, fallible, "immoral", mouthy and even cruel. All of these books have been challenged and sometimes banned. 

And that's because readers are either looking at them through 21st century or good-ole days glasses. Books about teen gangs, drugs, abusive parents, youth violence, depression, murder, ageism, racism, alcoholism, runaways, suicide all this was for adults. We kids had it with dinner on TV. No one protected us from it but they also never imagined WE were dealing with it too. Dead End kids excepted, virtually no story ). So now, topics like this might seem trite. Because people talk about these things now.  When they were written they were revolutionary.