St Martin Lanterns and Songs!

My children have been crafting today and had lots of fun creating their St Martin lanterns for his feast on the 11th November.

We used tracing paper, black cardboard, sticky tape, black wool, crayons.

I found some images on the net connected to St Martin, the first image is from a free colouring pages site called, 123 coloring. They have this webpage with many different geese images and we chose this one to use for the first lantern:

Click on image to enlarge.

Why geese? St Martin is associated with these loud but delightful birds, wikipedia says this:

"According to legend, Martin was reluctant to become bishop, which is why he hid in a stable filled with geese. The noise made by the geese betrayed his location to the people who were looking for him."

I printed up the images from the computer and allowed the children to trace the image onto tracing paper which also makes the perfect paper for making laterns being so transparent. They then coloured the image with crayons.

I used two wide strips of black cardboard to top and tail the image and then two thin strips of black cardboard along the edge, with more plain tracing paper on the other sides of the thin, black edges. It was then wrapped around into a tube and stuck together with tape. A cardboard bottom was cut for the floor of the lantern. Four stands of black wool attached at the top and it was completed.

Here is George's geese all lit up! I've used a small candle, similar to a tea-light, at the base, I put a bit of double sided tape at the bottom of the candle, before popping it in.

Here is another lantern, with Charlotte's image of St Martin.

To use that image click over to Charlotte's Waltzing Matilda blog where you can download the image.

The image below came from Kinderschule.

Click on image to enlarge.

My Faustina (12) worked on this image and coloured it beautifully:

Here it is being made into a lantern:

Here it is completed, ready to be lit:

Faustina holds it proudly!

The children really wish it was St Martin's day already, they had so much fun trying them out in the dark!

The final lantern is little Ambrose (4) he coloured in this image below that I found at Heraldry of the World:

Click on image to enlarge.

There he is peeping behind his creation!!

Running around in the darkness with their St Martin lanterns, we hope to make a couple of paper mache lanterns tomorrow to complete our line up and so I hope to share them soon.

We are now working on learning one of the traditional St Martin lantern songs, I found this music sheet here with the lyrics. HT: Pinewood Castle

Or here is the lyrics without music notation, click the lyrics open to enlarge and print.

Finally, here those English lyrics put to music in this youtube video:

We are all looking forward to this wonderful saint's feast day!