John Paul the Great: The Notebooks

We're finishing these up this week, and I want to pull together a final list of all the resources we used. (Don't forget to check out the surprise resource at the end of this post!)

Resources used:

The Young Life of Pope John Paul II, by Claire Jordan Mohan (the girls read and narrated it)

The Jeweler's Shop , by Pope John Paul II (I read the play, and we included a page in our notebooks about JPII, the playwright)

The Poetry of Pope John Paul II , by Pope John Paul II (I read a couple of selections to the girls, and they did part of one poem as copywork)

From Pflaum Publishing Group:

A wealth of resources! These are all pdf files, so I won't put the links here, but they're easy to get to through Pflaum. We used their biography, Encyclical summaries, Fascinating Facts quiz, Pope's Crest coloring page, Spreading the Word and Teach All Nations pages (geography sheets), another printable quiz as well as the pop-up online quiz, an "FYI" sheet and some of their information about electing a new pope.

The Young Life of Faustina Kowalska by Claire Jordan Mohan (with discussions on John Paul the Great's involvement in spreading the devotion, officially establishing Divine Mercy Sunday and canonizing St. Faustina ... many thanks to the beautiful website, Marians of the Immaculate Conception)

We are praying the Divine Mercy Novena, which began on Good Friday and is prayed through Divine Mercy Sunday

Visited Divine Mercy Images to see a number of different renderings of the Divine Mercy image

Viewed a short video/photo compilation at The Daughters of St. Paul website

Read and clipped articles about Sister Marie Simon-Pierre, who has been healed of Parkinson's disease

Printed out this coloring sheet of the pope (and when I explained the Latin phrase "Totus Tuus" to the girls, Betsy said, "Oh! Totus Cool!")

Printed out pictures of Our Lady of Fatima, of the Holy Father meeting with Sister Lucia, and of Our Lady of Czestochowa, in order to include a page on special devotions of John Paul the Great. We also discussed, in the context of his devotion to Our Lady of Fatima, the 1981 assassination attempt.

We also looked through all the pictures in Witness to Hope, by George Weigel

And, finally, what study on a great pope would be complete without Marvel Comics? (H/T to Mary at Our Domestic Church)


Special thanks to Alice and her notebook ideas, and to Heart and Mind magazine (whose link I cannot seem to access right now) for the wonderful unit study by Cay Gibson, Maureen Wittmann and Nancy Brown.

(Postscript: to include this link -- it's a pdf file -- to the Heart and Mind unit study. Thank you, Ana! For some reason the bookmark I'd saved was not working earlier today. )