In the Schoolroom – How to Make Your Pocket Shrines

The month of May is dedicated to the Blessed Mother and June to the Sacred Heart of Jesus.

Encouraging these devotions in our children is a way to deepen their faith and bring them closer to the love of God.

At the heart of Catholicism is love. Not our love of God but His profound love of us. He offered His only Son and His beautiful mother suffered greatly all for love of us.

Making Your Pocket Shrine

A lovely project for these devotions it to create pocket shrines. This allows the children a lot of creativity and would also make nice Mother’s Day and Father’s Day gifts. All that is needed is a small box or tin, paints, some holy cards or photocopies of holy pictures, scraps of trimmings, glue, glitter, and whatever else the children like to add.

Paint the boxes first so the children start off with a dry surface. This craft is a nice way to use some of those extra medals, bits of broken rosaries, and cards that come unsolicited in the mail.

When given as gifts, we wrap the tiny statues in tissue paper and include them in the shrines. You may recognize the picture in the Marian shrine, it’s from a Seton book! At the end of the school year before getting rid of the workbooks I pull out several pages with particularly beautiful pictures for the children to use in making Christmas cards or to use for projects like these. The artwork is too lovely not to recycle.

If you decide to make some pocket shrines, please email photos to mbarrett@setonhome.org.

We would love to share them here and on social media!

Prayers

During this month, it might be nice to learn the traditional prayers. Younger children can learn the shorter prayers, the older children can learn the Hail Mary (Ave Maria) and the Lord’s Prayer (Pater Noster) in Latin:

O Sacred Heart of Jesus, I place my trust in thee!

O Mary conceived without sin,
pray for us who have recourse to thee.

The Our Father:

PATER NOSTER, qui es in caelis,
sanctificetur nomen tuum. Adveniat regnum tuum.
Fiat voluntas tua, sicut in caelo et in terra.
Panem nostrum quotidianum da nobis hodie,
et dimitte nobis debita nostra sicut et nos
dimittimus debitoribus nostris.
Et ne nos inducas in tentationem,
sed libera nos a malo. Amen.

The Hail Mary:

AVE MARIA, gratia plena,
Dominus tecum.
Benedicta tu in mulieribus,
et benedictus fructus ventris tui, Iesus.
Sancta Maria, Mater Dei, ora pro nobis peccatoribus,
nunc, et in hora mortis nostrae. Amen.

Seton Mom Heather Cushman and her children tried Mary Ellen Barrett’s pocket shrine craft from our last issue of the Seton Magazine.