Decorate an Alleluia Banner With Your Kids {Guest Post}

Good morning! Today Tacy from Picture a Skyline is guest posting with a craft to help prepare your kids for Easter! I love how simple this is, and I know all my kids will really enjoy making this one. 

You could customize it easily by letting them paint the flowers (which would be beautiful and is NOT what we're going to do because I know my limits) or color with crayons or colored pencils. Then hide it away and bring it out again for Easter morning!

Tacy is a wife and mom of three little girls and one boy, with another baby due in September! She blogs at Picture a Skyline, and also writes for Real Housekeeping, an online magazine.

This year, the most fun craft we did during Lent was actually more like a Preparing-for-Easter type thing.  I'm on the fence as to how to categorize it, but we're going with Lent, since that's when we made and decorated our Alleluia banner. However, this will make a nice decoration on our pantry door all through Eastertide!

This particular craft was fun because it was good for all of my girls ages 2, 4, and 6, but, as you may have guessed, my one-year-old boy didn't take much interest in it, if any.

First, I made the Alleluia letters in text edit (on a Mac), using the "Zapfino" 72 pt. font. Each letter took up its own line, so it took about 3-4 sheets of paper to print.  I then cut out the letters, and attached them to the gray card stock paper. We used two 8 1/2 x 11 sheets of paper. For the printing, you could also use Google Drive.

I found some pretty, free printable flowers from firstpallette.com. I printed those out on white card stock paper, and let my girls take turns coloring them with markers. I was so impressed at how they took their time and did their best with coloring the flowers.

I made the border using a collage of cut-outs from an LL Bean magazine. I used a ruler to mark off a border on the gray cardstock first, then filled it in with cut-outs from said magazine. My oldest helped a little, but the little girls just had fun using kid scissors to cut pieces of magazine into little, tiny pieces that didn't end up making it to the border! They mostly ended up on the floor. I also had an exclamation point, but that went the way of little hands holding kid scissors! Haha, oh well! They all helped with cutting out the flowers, but again, my littlest ones mostly cut the leftover paper just for fun!

We attached the flowers with clear, heavy tape. And again, we used card stock for the base, and for printing out the flowers. I think the success of your project really depends on using card stock for this. I highly recommend it for coloring with markers and cutting practice for little hands!

To make your own:
1. Print out the word Alleluia using text edit, or Google Drive, or a word processor of your choice.
2. Then, print these flowers out:
3. Cut out the letters for Alleluia.
4. Color and then cut out your flowers.
5. Attach to card stock color of choice.
6. Add a collage border using magazine of choice.
7. If desired, add an exclamation point at the end!
8. There you are! All done! :-)

I really hope you try this with your kids. We had a lot of fun making our Alleluia Banner.

Thanks so much for the great craft, Tacy! I'll definitely be making this with my kids - they'll love it!

You can visit Tacy at Picture a Skyline - go check out her blog!

Want to check out more?  Here's a sensory bin you could create, a prayer chain, a free printable coloring book, a lacing cross, or a candlelit prayer card.