Saint Helen and Queen Esther

We move from historical royalty to God's Princesses... First, Saint Helen. She was a queen from Ancient Rome, the mother of Emperor Constantine, who went on a quest to the Holy Land to find the true cross of Christ. Ellie is always fascinated by the lives of saints, so I had to include at least one saint this week. There are quite a few royal saints. We started our day by coloring tiaras and pictures of Saint Helen. 

After reading the story of Saint Helen, we mapped her journey from Rome to Palestine. We also spent some time looking at maps on the iPad, finding the countries of all the different princesses we have learned about all week. Ellie really got into our little geography lesson, spinning the globe, zooming in... 

Then we made St. Helen peg dolls and paper boats for her to ride in... along with some craft stick crosses.

We next read about Queen Esther from the Old Testament. This book is cool because it has a lot of other "princesses" from the Bible, so it appeals to the princess lovers' sensibilities while teaching valuable lessons about women of God.

We learned that the Jewish holiday of Purim is a celebration of her saving the Jewish people from annihilation. She was brave to stand up for her people. We colored some finger puppets, and Ellie put on a cute little show with them over breakfast the next day.

At this point, we started to lose some steam in our enthusiasm for our theme week, so there were fewer activities, and we welcomed breaks like going to the gym, finding neighbors to play, and swimming after dinner.