You know my love for seeking out solid Catholic kids DVDs right?  I feel like I’ve hit the jackpot with this new one, it’s called Brother Francis and it’s created by Herald Kids.  Who is Brother Francis and what is this Catholic series about?  Here is the description from their website:

“Join Brother Francis and his friends as they inspire children in their Catholic faith.  This entertaining and instructive series features stories, visual examples, music and practical application!”

Practice makes perfect! This is a true saying whether one is playing basketball, drawing a picture, reading or even praying! In this wonderfully fun inaugural episode the ever-joyful Brother Francis will help your children establish a personal relationship with God!

This episode features:

• “The Sign of the Cross” — a catchy tune about an important prayer gesture.
• “Let’s Pray!” — a captivating song showing us how we can pray anywhere!
• “The Our Father” — the traditional prayer sung to a moving melody.
• “With God’s Love!” — a song that encourages us to serve others.
• “The Little Way of Saint Therese” — a visualized story . . . and lots of fun!

Faith Formation Features
The DVD we watched today is called Let’s Pray! and it features two basic but important prayers,  The Sign of the Cross and The Our Father
and presented Saint Therese and her Little Way of doing things with big love.  It also includes two other authentic songs, “With God’s Love!” and “Let’s Pray!”.

I love how this DVD starts and how Brother Francis compares prayer to sports (something kids can relate to) and basically to anything you want to do right, you have to practice it.  My kids laughed so much when Brother Francis explained the importance of attitude during prayer, if you want to make prayer boring, you pray in an uninterested way.  (Brother Francis goes on to pretend to fall asleep, my kids couldn’t contain their laughter -wonder if they were relating to him?  LOL)  You don’t want to have a conversation with anyone when you aren’t interested in them do you?  Well why would you with God?

Animation
The animation is fantastic!  There are different kinds throughout but I just love how the main scenes of the video, although cartoons, the sky is always a real sky…which gives it a beautiful feel and a real one at that.  When the video went to talk about St. Therese the animation changed a little and made it look like it was older, which was neat because we were going back in time to learn about the little Saint!

Multiple Learning Styles
I also like that the video includes music and sets the prayers to music.  This helps all of our different kinds of learners, visual and auditory.  🙂  I like that you can print activities out afterwards for the more tactile learners.  Each DVD has a set of print out pages with activities associated with the theme of the video and coloring pages as well.  There are a couple of pages recapping the main lessons of the video with some of the same illustrations from the DVD; I thought this was a neat feature.  My favorite page is the one called, “Lord, Help to be Holy”, because it makes the kids really think about what they just learned in the DVD and almost make a little “pledge” or “promise” to God asking Him to make them Holy.  This page looks like this:

Languages
Since one of my goals this year is to expose the kids to more Spanish (my first language), I really love the fact that you can play the videos in English or in Spanish, El Hermano Zeferino.  We actually watched it in Spanish after watching it in English, it was great!  The Spanish was neutral Spanish (if you teach Spanish or a speaker, you know what I mean).  It was easy to listen and understand and follow.  This will definitely one of my go to resources to teach my kids prayers in Spanish!

Evaluation

Overall, I give this Brother Francis DVD entitled Let’s Pray! an A+ for awesome illustrations, music, story line, and message!  This would make a great resource for every Catholic homeschool and also fantastic to have in our parishes as part of their Faith Formation programs.  Interested in ordering your own copy of this or any of the other Brother Francis DVDs?  Please visit Brother Francis at his website.

Blessings,
Erika