"40 Days Of Lent" Paper Chain Craft Kit
3.7
5
11
11
VERY Pleasantly Surprised
I bought these expecting them to be pretty generic Christian based links (which was fine w/me) but then when I found the Catholic related Lenten prayers/links, I was thrilled as we are deeply devoted to our Catholic tradition in our home.
March 15, 2011
WARNING NON- CATHOLIC users
I purchased for our Lutheran church and didn't realize there were 4-5 chains that were very catholic in nature (ex: praying for pope, praying rosary, etc.)
I sent them home with families without looking at them first, my mistake!!
I would have pulled those chains and supplemented something else if i would have known ahead of time.
so this is your warning!! :)
February 19, 2013
Cool end result but a lot of prep work
I teach CCD for our Catholic Church so these catholic-oriented strips were perfect. However, it took a lot of prep work to get it organized. I have 25 in my class so needless to say, it took hours to sort out and reorganize for each student. It would be nice if there was a rhyme or reason to the order of the strips. I finally put them out in piles by picture (praying hands, dove, etc) and by each individual strip within that group. I then rearranged into weeks and what made sense (ie: flowers seemed good for Saturdays, green fish seemed good for Fridays, crosses seemed good for Mondays, red hearts for Wednesdays, holy week was all the reds) I then numbered each day from 1 being Holy Saturday to 46 being Ash Wednesday (l feel that Easter should be at the top). Then I took one from each pile to make a set for each child, in order from 1-46. Whew! Try that 25 times :) I had ordered 2 packages of 24 and there were enough extras to make 25 complete sets plus even more extras. Paper was sturdy and glue worked. Yay!
February 10, 2013
Preparation Needed Before Presenting
I spent about 3 hours preparing this craft for my ten students. The strips are not in any order coming out of the package. The pictures on the strips do not indicate a particular week of Lent. It took time to figure out a logical order for the strips, to make sure they were completely punched out, to make a master set in the order I wanted, and then to group the remaining nine sets. I was disappointed to find out that two of the twelve sets did not have an adequate number of strips. Each of those sets were shorted by three strips. Finding these errors took time as well. Because I am a teacher of Catholic religious education, I was happy with the content. I do agree with the other reviewers, tho, that the set should be started with Easter Sunday at the banner and Ash Wednesday at the free end. I will use tape with my students to secure the chains rather than the glue. In all, I hope it goes well, but I have spent a lot of time preparing this for them. It would have never gone well if I had just gone into my classroom and opened the packages!
February 3, 2013
Helpful, but
This is a good product, especially for Catholic Religious Ed teachers (includes recommendations to Pray the Rosary, Pray for the Bishop, Pray for our Pope). But is was a bit more complicated than I initially expected (based on the product description). I ended up putting the chains together for our students for the period Ash Wednesday until Palm Sunday. The students only did Holy Week -- all enjoyed it and families have commented on how it's been useful as a family learning experience as well. More work on the teacher's part - - but a good tool overall.
February 16, 2012
Timely to Sort out
Bought for my class of prek / kindergarterners. Links were timely to sort out and ripped easily. Some links weren't premoistened and had to be taped. It was very inexpensive but I would rather of payed more and had a better product. Would like other Lent Crafts
March 23, 2011
Great project for 3-4 graders
I bought these and had my Sunday School class make them and they worked really well. The sayings on each link were really good suggestions for the kids and made sense to them.
March 15, 2011
NOT FOR PROTESTANT DENOMINATIONS!
I purchased this for a Shrove Tuesday event hoping this would help our church school children learn about how they can spend the 40 days of Lent.
I was disappointed to see that the paper links included such ideas such as "Pray the rosary" and "pray for your Pope and Bishops"Since we are a Protestant denomination this is inappropriate for our use.
I wish I had read the reviews of others but I think OT should include a more accurate description about the product that would include the fact that this is a Catholic product.
Aside from that, the links were not well organized and I can see how children will need a lot of help getting them apart and assembled correctly.
OT did issue me a credit but I was left without an appropriate activity for our event :(
For these 2 reasons I am giving the activity 1 star.
March 10, 2011
Great product!
I really liked this product. Ordered it as an activity for families attending our Lent Fair. I am a coordinator of Children's Ministry at a Catholic Church and was very pleased to see that some of the links were Catholic oriented! The quality of paper used was very good and self-adhesive aspect was great. I always assemble a craft before having the kids make them and I found that it took me almost an hour to make this chain. I also changed the order - putting Ash Wednesday on the free end so that the kids could remove a link every day and work up the chain to Easter Sunday. A few of the links would not stick so needed to use glue for those. Definitely an activity that needs some adult supervision to get the links in the right order. My parents at the Lent Fair were also very pleased with the results!
March 8, 2011
not perfect
I bought this to use with my 2nd-5th grade class. I always do a "dry run" with crafts and activities at home prior to Sunday School. First of all, the directions instruct you to moisten the adhesive strip to make the chains. Gross. I wouldn't make anyone lick that many strips (40)--so I plan on using tape. Secondly, I changed the direction of the links. Instead of having Easter on the free end, I will have my kids attach Easter to the top piece. This way, they can detach a link every day and use the chain like a count-down to Easter. Visually, it will be neat to see the days disappear, I think. Also, I would have liked a guide as to the order that all the links were supposed to go in. I had to take more time than I wanted to figure out where all the links belonged.The most disappointing aspect was the this was geared to those of the Catholic faith: "Pray the rosary" and "Pray for our bishop and pope"---I will have to have the kids mark through and rewrite 2 of the strips to be more appropriate for our denomination.
March 3, 2011
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