Activities for the Feast of St. Anthony

St. Anthony of Padua is celebrated on his feast day of June 13. Born in Lisbon, Portugal, in 1195, he was made a saint just a year after he died, and is known as the patron saint of lost items as well as fishermen and sailors, priests and travelers.

It’s that lost items one he’s most known for, and lots of people with kids celebrate the feast day with treasure hunts for that reason. Let’s look at some St. Anthony feast day activities for kids.

Love & Messiness has a cute St. Anthony scavenger hunt, though if you don’t live in a community that has a lot of statues of Mary and St. Anthony you might want to write your own for things that you can expect to find on a neighborhood walk or around your church.

Catholic Homebody has a set of St. Anthony printable coloring pages and ideas for other activities you can do with kids, like playing hide and seek. They also have a book list if you want to learn more about St. Anthony for kids.

Faith Filled Freebies has some printable St. Anthony clip art that you could print for activities such as hiding the images around a room or the backyard to see who can find them most or find them all.

Some of the links are missing in the post about St. Anthony’s Day at Equipping Catholic Families, but there are still some good ideas there. The Pope shelf sounds like something my grandmother would have done! Ideas include a St. Anthony peg doll, I Spy and a magic box that causes things to disappear and reappear.

Speaking of I spy, check out this video from Catholic Crafts on how to make your own St. Anthony I spy bottle.

And I don’t know why St. Anthony rolls are called St. Anthony rolls, but I found a recipe from Cooking with Nonna that looks delicious if you want to try them for the holiday. Or any other time.

When my daughter was younger I would spend a lot of time trying to come up with activities she could do in the car on long road trips and things to entertain her when we were waiting at restaurants and things that didn’t involve screens.

But it turns out there are a lot of great activities you can do with just a piece of paper and a pen.

What Do We Do All Day has a great collection of pen and paper games, including some that can be done with just one person, though they’re all more fun if you have at least two.

There are some classics on here like hangman and dots and boxes, but there are also quite a few I hadn’t heard of before.

I don’t want to spoil the whole list for you because you should definitely click over there and look around, but I will share about the one that you see pictured above.

This game is called Bridges, and you start by making the big random shape and the dividing it into a bunch of sections (the post says 30-50 sections is ideal but I think this one is smaller than that).

Each player gets their own color marker and you take turns drawing bridges from one space to another, crossing a third. Once there’s a bridge, no other bridges can start, end or cross in those spaces. Keep going until no more bridges can be built, and the person who makes the last bridge wins.

Check out the post over at What We Do All Day for more great ideas for no or almost-no prep games you can play with your kids or that kids can play together. I’d love to know if you have a favorite paper and pen game, whether it’s on this list or a different one.

[Photo: What We Do All Day]

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