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.

Growing Up Ladybug and How to Become a Butterfly are both by Stepanka Sekaninova and illustrated by Linh Dao, and they came out at the same time and are on similar themes, so let’s look at them together.

Growing Up Ladybug is narrated by Mariella, a seven-spot ladybug. She talks about the parts of a ladybug, where they live, different kinds of ladybugs, why humans love them, their defenses against predators and the life cycle of a ladybug.

The drawings are cute if not always scientifically accurate, it’s not in such a way that’s likely to confuse kids (who probably already know that ladybug mamas don’t push their larval babies around in strollers, for instance.

It’s a good general description of the life cycle of a lady bug and why we like having them around.

About the book: 32 pages, hardcover. Published 2026 by Albatross Media. Suggested retail price $16.95.

Similarly, How to Become a Butterfly covers the life cycle of a butterfly, starting with caterpillars eating burning nettle leaves. (Here Amanda is the narrator.) The book talks about a few of the more than 18,000 daytime butterflies in the world as well as other creatures that live in the meadow (there’s that ladybug again, along with crickets, bees and other bugs).

It also covers some of the enemies of caterpillars like wasps and spiders, and the defenses that caterpillars use to try to prevent being eaten. It illustrates how caterpillars grow and change as they molt and prepare to pupate, and what a caterpillar looks like before and while it is forming its chrysalis. And while the book uses the word metamorphasis it doesn’t really talk about what happens between the caterpillar forming a chrysalis and the butterfly hatching.

This butterfly is a peacock butterfly, and once it hatches the book covers the parts of a butterfly and the life cycle. It also talks about nocturnal moths (though it says nocturnal butterflies are “usually called moths” when moths are actually a different species) and what butterflies do at night.

I’m maybe a little hard on this book because my daughter is a butterfly expert from way back, but it is still cute and good for the very basic basics of the butterfly life cycle.

Both books would be fun additions to your bookshelf for younger kids starting to learn about different animals or who have an interest in insects.

About the book: 32 pages, hardcover. Published 2026 by Albatross Media. Suggested retail price $16.95.

Have you read?

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