Manners Class: Mr and Mrs Wright and Mr and Mrs Wrong
We had a whole unit on Manners, Etiquette, and the Bible. This was a joint venture with the other church school classes. We set up “Mrs B’s Café” to teach the children about table manners. (and yes, there are lessons in the Bible that pertain to table manners….).
We had some of our adult parishioners act the parts of the married couples, the Wrights and the Wrongs. The kids had a hoot as they watched their deacon and church secretary (posing as Mr and Mrs Wrong) slurp their soup, spit out food, and eat with their mouths open and elbows on the table (the wrong way). It was hysterical. The Wrights on the other hand, were simply appalled at the horrid manners of the Wrongs. It was quite comical!
Lesson Set on the Chronicals of Narnia:
This was before the movie came out, but it was fun nonetheless. We watched the BBC version of the Chronicals in 6 segments, and studied a bible lesson from each. We made our own Turkish delight, we had our whole classroom decorated like Narnia (complete with lamppost), and we made life-size “Christian soldiers” by tracing our bodies as we laid down on big sheet s of paper. We had lots of discussions about tough topics, like temptation, evil, the death of Jesus, the resurrection, and what heaven is like. It was wonderful.
Travelling down the Road to Salvation:
Our theme was a journey through the bible, and the whole year centered around cars and driving. My favorite lesson was when we studied the 10 commandments, which are the “rules of the road” for life. The children had to study for their “road test” by learning the commandments. When they passed, they were given a “10-Commandments License” which I presented to them in church. They were thrilled because it really looked like a NY State drivers license! You will be happy to know that I no longer fabricate licenses!
Stewardship Lesson
One month, I decided to teach on stewardship and titheing, and used some materials from Crown Ministries. This was a fun lesson for me, not only because it had real-life applications for the children, but because I personally learned so much about what God has to say about money, stewardship and Himself. But from the children’s point of view, we learned how to budget our money by making special banks with compartments for spending, titheing, charity and saving. We learned how to best spend the money we have by setting up an imaginary grocery store, where the children got to play with a life-like cash register and see how many groceries they could buy with their play money. We learned how to care for things, and they were actually sewing/mending holes in socks. (I seemed to have plenty of socks for them to practice on, since2 socks go into my dryer, but only 1 seems to come out J)
Lessons on the temptation of Jesus
One year, I was teaching what about the Temptation of Jesus in the desert. I set up a relay race/obstacle course kind of thing where the children had to race from station to station to experience the different temptations of Christ. We were using a “Super Jesus” kind of idea, to show that Christ was stronger that Satan and able to ward him off by simply speaking scripture. So, to start, the kids had throw on a cape and goggles, run to the next station where they had to eat a piece of bread (temptation of turning stones into bread), run to the next station, where they had to climb a ladder ( temptation of going up to a high place), etc etc, until they were done with the temptations. It was funny to see them running around with capes on, and they had a blast.
