Last Minute Ball Toss

This morning I was running through my lesson plan for today one last time to make sure I didn't forget anything and realized that I didn't have a single ball or bean bag toy, stuffed animal or anything that slightly resembled a kid-sized tossing mechanism for us to use during our little 'game'. I had this 'genius idea' that called for us to sit in a circle on the floor for a small class activity during the lesson and toss a small object to each other and complete the sentence "I am thankful for _____". I ran frantically around the apartment trying to find something that we could toss to each other without getting hurt and all I could come up with were things like shoes, boxes of Kleenex, DVDs... nothing toss-worthy whatsoever!
Needless to say, I ended up in the last room of the house, the bathroom. (There aren't that many rooms so it didn't take too long) My eye was drawn to the rolls of toilet paper that my husband left perched on the counter. I grabbed one and ran to my fabric stash and grabbed the first piece of fabric that I thought would be big enough (it only needed to be 18'' x 18'' square to fit I found out later) and wrapped the fabric around the toilet roll stuffing the ends into the inside of the cardboard roll in the middle!
It wasn't fancy, but it wasn't the normal ball that the kids were used to. It was the hit of the lesson today! It was just odd-shaped enough to catch their attention and they liked rolling it around and tossing it to each other. The most important thing was, no one got hurt! Many of the kids in our class are different sizes (since they're between the ages of 3 and 5) and definitely have different strength between them, but the roll was so soft and squishy that no one had any problems at all!
I did secure the inside a bit with some sewing pins, being sure to stick them inside the center cardboard roll on the diagonal so no little hands would get pricked accidentally and it kept the fabric secure the entire game! I'm thinking of a way to make a little pattern and hopefully post it here at a later date for a more permanent fixture to keep on hand in our Primary closet for future last minute tossing needs!

Reverence: Sara and Sam Sunbeam

I found a cute idea here with new ‘friends’ Sara and Sam Sunbeam. My husband was a bit skeptical, but I was determined to give it a try. I was working on this the day before the lesson so I didn’t have time to print out nice colorful versions, laminate them and so on. I simply put the images into Paint, colored them in, and printed them. I cut them out and slapped them on some Popsicle sticks and we were good to go. The kids paid total attention while I was introducing my new ‘friends’ saying that they had never been to primary before and needed to learn how to act. I went through questions like “What do our hands do in Primary?” “What do our feet do in Primary?” and the kids never looked away. I printed out extra sheets with black and white pictures of Sara and Sam Sunbeam that the kids colored in and they ended up wanting to cut them out and have their own ‘friends’. Anytime during the lesson that followed, I would simply say, “What do our ___ do in Primary?” (Insert whatever they are using to be distracting to the other kids) and point at the figures that we taped to the chalkboard. Sara and Sam Sunbeam are a huge success in our Primary class. The whole ordeal took all but 10 minutes (including the coloring – which only happened the first week) but the lesson they learned will (hopefully) last a lifetime.

Thank you Sugardoodle for a wonderful idea!

What do you use to help your kids be reverent?

My "Ah-Ha" Moment

My husband and I were recently called as Primary Teachers in our married-student ward at BYU-Idaho. Last week I came home crying from teaching our first lesson. Everything that could have gone wrong did. I mean EVERYTHING.

Children were going crazy running around the room fighting over toys (the origin of which I’m still baffled by), 3 kids escaped and ran into the Chapel during another ward’s sacrament and my husband had to chase him around 3 laps until someone caught on what was going on, others were crying for their parents and screaming, one was trying to hang off of the curtains, and on top of everything else, one little boy had an accident and didn’t tell anyone until he was completely soiled, down his legs and up his back.

I came home and never wanted to go back. I felt completely defeated. I sat on the couch on the verge of tears for several minutes before realizing that I was completely and utterly unprepared for this calling that I thought we had in the bag! Both my husband and I have taught in the Primary before, and we were both Nursery leaders as well. We thought we had this totally handled and that it would be a piece of cake and by doing so we underestimated the power of 10 3-5 year olds, bored, energetic, and totally aware of our shortcomings.

After some time to calm down and do some other things for a while, I came to the computer and started searching the internet for any sources that could help me prepare to tackle this thing called “Sunbeams”. I realized that the more prepared I could be, the better the lessons would go. Having never taught children of this age, I needed to look to some experienced members for their advice. After a quick prayer and a moment of reflection, I began my search. Needless to say, I found a plethora of sites, blogs and articles all across the internet. This was even before I tried calling friends and family for their advice as well.

Everyone seemed to start by saying the same thing: be prepared. Different sites had wonderful ideas on how to encourage reverence, how to keep my cool, what kids of this age find interesting so they won’t get bored, things that I knew that I didn’t have time to just sit by and figure things out myself. We had 7 days until our next lesson and I had to come armed with solutions to the problems that I knew I would be facing.

I buckled down and started listing things that I knew were problems that I saw this week:

• Reverence

• Kindness (we had some rough housing)

• Inside Voices (screaming was a fun pastime of theirs)

• Boredom
  

• Staying in our Chairs

• Participation in Lessons and Sharing Time

This is when I realized that I had ideas of my own that I know work really well with older and younger children that maybe others are hoping to find help with. This is what made me have my “ah-ha” moment in starting this blog. Not only am I hoping to document things for myself to reference in the future, but also, so that others may have yet another resource for them to look to if they are stumped and need a fresh point of view. I will try to tackle each category on a later date with some of the tips that I found useful, as well as things that worked themselves out on their own. I still have many strategies that I am in the process of trying to see which works best for these kids. For now, we are working on our upcoming lessons and have a new and refreshed sense of commitment to this calling. Thank you for your support in the trek of mine and I hope that I can help at least one other person and keep the cycle of exchanging information going!