General Resource

1-800-55-ENVOY
Website: http://www.envoymagazine.com
A beautiful full-color glossy magazine on Catholic apologetics. The magazine is trendy in format (meant to appeal to teens and "Generation Xers") but orthodox in content. Although we don't subscribe to this magazine, I've seen a few issues and have been very impressed. Some articles I read included sample scenarios of how to explain Catholic teachings in particular situations. I thought this was a very helpful way of preparing people for apologetics. This magazine also includes Scott Hahn's newsletter Scripture Matters.

I am so excited to post a review on this new coloring book! My girls and I spent a great part of the last weekend working on these beautiful pictures to color! Sean Fitzpatrick, the artist, knows very well what gets young artists to want to grab those colored pencils...

The illustrations are fairly simple for young hands and yet a more experienced artist can have a lot of fun with it. Hillside Education's site offers the suggestion of brushing the finished pictures with vegetable oil for a stained glass effect, and we did that!

Fenestrae Fidei is a companion book to Catholic Mosaic, also by Hillside Education, yet may be perfectly well used alone. For each of the illustrations, which are depicted in calendar (and liturgical) year order, there is a brief explanatory paragraph.

If you want to do it with Catholic Mosaic, a great idea would be to occupy the readers with the coloring activity while the picture book is read aloud. (Catholic Mosaic is a compendium of study/activity guides on numerous Catholic-theme picture books - many of which can be found through your local library).

Fenestrae Fidei (or, in English, "Windows of Faith") comes in a spiral bound format, with a large black & white drawing on each page. There are lots of them, as Catholic Mosaic author Cay Gibson lists four picture books per month. The drawings are all in a stylized iconic style, varying somewhat in intensity of detail. And they are just beautiful!

I would have liked to see a heavier stock paper in the pages, but what we have been doing is scanning and printing copies for home use. This allows for several children, for instance, to work on the same pictures at any time. Hillside Publications allows for coying within one family, which is of course a wonderful advantage.

Fenestrae Fidei is a very Catholic book, reflecting events of the life of Our Lord, the tradition of our Church and the holiness of the saints.

Families today are fortunate to have a product such as this!

Like many Catholic Home schooling families, providing a Catholic education was number one on the list of reasons my husband and I wanted to home school. In addition, we wanted a rigorous education, and one that emphasized the beauties of truth and love. Translating these goals into a curriculum is an on-going challenge. Sometimes the books that do a good job presenting a particular subject do it without the light of the Faith. Other times, books that are "solidly Catholic" are also unattractive and uninspiring. We have had to compromise in a lot of areas.

Two that we have not had to compromise in are science and history, and this is largely due to the Catholic school supplements produced by James Leek. These two are among the most excellent resources I have come across in home schooling. They include interesting material for study and careful explanation of an approach to education that is beautifully in keeping with our holy faith. In themselves, these explanations are worth reading and incorporating into your teaching.

In science, for example, Mr. Leek explains the integrating principles for a Catholic science education. Ultimately, our aim is to better know the Creator of everything. Science study also has remote ends: that we develop a respect for God's creation, and learn to contemplate and reflect on it, and that we exercise our minds to improve life and serve our fellow men. At the same time, science has its proximate and immediate ends: to learn how the world works and to take in sensory data of the physical reality around us.

These principles are very well realized in Leek's science supplement. For the Beauty of the Earth includes a textbook with literary selections organized around the common subject matter of science. The lyrics of the beautiful hymn from which this program draws its title provide the organizing system. In addition to "the beauty of the earth" (weather, metals, energy), we have chapters on "the glory of the skies" (stars, the sun), "hill and vale and tree and flower" "the mystic harmony linking sense to sound and sight" (insects, spiders, mammals), and "the joy of human love" (the senses, emotions, the will.)

The corresponding teacher's guide builds on the readings with questions and activities that take the student from considering the text, to observing the natural world, to admiring God's handiwork, and finally, to the religious analogy. An example to illustrate this progression would be the reading of "Phaeton and Apollo." After the selection is read, the student is asked a series of questions on the text: Who was Phaeton? Describe the court of the sun, etc. Next, students are asked to make some observations about the sun: Where does it rise and set? Does it actually move? What makes it appear to move? Then they are asked to consider the sun's role in life on our planet, and finally, to how the sun is like God, how its marvelous working points to the existence of God.

Questions and activities are broken into grade levels so that this program can be used throughout the elementary years. My first reaction when I looked at For the Beauty of the Earth was to think that this was a liberal arts soft-pedaling of the hard subject of science. But after I carefully read the author's introduction, I decided it could be so much more than that, and it more than met those expectations. We used it alternately with our regular science text, allowing the literary selections and projects to set the tone for our textbook's coverage. Along with enjoying some good stories, memorizing poems and scriptures, doing some fun projects (like building a humane mousetrap), I found that the sense of wonder created through the program carried into the rest of our textbook consideration of each topic. The course is cross-referenced with many of the most popular school science text series from the time it was published (early 1980s).

Inviting the reader in with its black and white illustrations on each page, Great Moments in Catholic History presents one hundred exceptional events in the history of the Catholic Church. Originally published in 1938, each page presents a great moment beginning with the Annunciation and ending with Pope Pius XI's 1937 Encyclical letter on Atheistic Communism. At the end of the book there are 500 quiz questions, 5 for each of the 100 historical events, to review the lessons learned.

This book would be helpful in enriching the study of history with a Catholic perspective. One cannot begin to appreciate history without first understanding the impact of Christ and His church on historical events; The easy-to-read format of this book makes that understanding almost effortless.

The author recommends using this book as a supplement for seventh and eighth graders. However my younger students have benefited from using Great Moments in Catholic History as a read-aloud book. Not only have the children enjoyed learning from our read aloud time, but so have I.

Like many of Neumann Press' books, Great Moments in Catholic History is beautifully bound. The black hardcover is embossed with gold and it is filled with ivory 60-pound paper.