Wednesday, February 01, 2006

The Heavenly Meeting

We had our Catholic homeschool group meeting yesterday, such as it is. In our overly large parish, there are only four families who homeschool, so our humble little group consists of four moms (grateful for each other) and 14 kids (perhaps even more grateful than we are.)

Yesterday was "theater day." Each of the older children chose a saint to portray. We gave them the premise of their play: You are all meeting up at the pearly gates of Heaven, and you proceed to ... do what? Have tea? Talk about Jesus? Compare notes on the time periods in which you lived? We set them loose to plan it while we took the little ones downstairs to act out Noah's Ark.

The ark was a kids' play tent, my friend's five-year old boy was Noah and his three-year old sister Mrs. Noah. The other little ones spent most of their time tossing stuffed animals into the ark and not answering my questions about key plot points. How is it that a whirring video camera (yes, mine still whirs which tells you how old it is) renders a child mute?

Finally it was time for the older kids to perform their play. They had delightful dress-up costumes, had decorated the floor of heaven with a rose garden (construction paper is good for so many things, and so much fun to cut and scatter) and we all proceeded to learn a whole lot about eight different saints as the actors narrated the lives they'd chosen to share. The final line in the play came from our group's oldest boy, 13-year old L.: "I'm hungry. Let's go get something to eat."

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