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.

Did you know that October is Squirrel Awareness Month? I didn’t know we needed more awareness of these little creatures, but let’s take it as a sign to learn more about squirrels!

Let’s start with some fun facts via Kids Konnect: did you know there are five subfamilies and more that 280 species of squirrels? The smallest are pygmy squirrels and the largest, the Bhutan giant flying squirrel, can be longer that 4 feet (1.2 meters).

Tree squirrels can climb down trees so fast because their ankles can rotate 180 degrees, allowing them to grab the tree bark as they go down. While most squirrels don’t survive their first year of life, they can live five to 10 years in the wild and squirrels have been known to live up to 20 years in captivity!

Rhythms of Play has more fun facts and tips for observing squirrels if you want to add some real life nature to your nature study.

We always like to start these collections with life cycle and parts of the animal printables, so let’s grab the squirrel life cycle an parts of a squirrel worksheets from Montessori Nature. (It doesn’t look like these are free any more but they have a whole unit study on squirrels you can buy that includes life cycle and parts activities, characteristics of different kinds of squirrels, a printable poster, information about predators and more.)

Grab the squirrel lapbook printable (free with email address) from Homeschool Share to learn the parts of a squirrel, where they live, what they eat, whether they hibernate and more. There’s also a nut taste test printable, a place for making observations about squirrels, life cycle of an oak tree, games and more.

Simple Everyday Mom has some cute squirrel themed worksheets including tracing the letter s, labeling the parts of a squirrel and a letter s maze. She also has more activity pages with a squirrel theme, including matching, a more traditional maze and a counting and graphing activity.

Work on letter recognition with this squirrel and acorn game printable from Teaching Mama. I love the idea of hiding the letters in a fall themed sensory bin for kids to find, identify and match to the letter on the worksheet.

For older kids you can do this “if I were a squirrel” writing prompt from Lesson Planet.

And throw in a little counting with these squirrel and acorn tens frame printables from JDaniel4’s Mom, which you can use to count real acorns or any other little fall themed thing you have handy.

Have you read?

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