Movie Time

Today was another first for our class… We decided to show a short movie of Jonah and the Whale. It took a long time of searching the internet to find an age-appropriate, biblically accurate, short movie, but after a couple of hours of searching, we found one that was pretty good! Our class ranges in age from 3-5 so we needed something that would appeal to all of them, and keep their attention!


The movie we found that worked the best was 9 minutes long, animated, and had narration as well as actual voices for the characters. The kids surprised us all when they actually could answer questions after the movie about the story! We combined this story with the activity “Gone Fishing” and it was a bit hit! I almost had tears in my eyes when one of the little girls said “That looks just like the fish that swallowed Jonah!” when she ‘caught’ one of the blank fish to color in on her own.


The kids seemed to pay attention, and actually retain the information in the story. Obviously, we can’t use this in every lesson, but it’s a great treat for them to get to watch a movie while at church. Now, I am always on the lookout for good clips to show the kids for future lessons!

Gone Fishing

This week, our lesson was “I am thankful for fish”. We struggle each week trying to come up with ideas for activities that are physical enough to keep the kids engaged, but reverent enough to be done in a church on a Sunday. This week, coming straight from the manual, we had a great idea to go fishing!

We bought a kid’s size fishing pole at Walmart, and brought a sheet with us to church. I just tied some yarn onto the end of the pole (we didn’t want any accidents with fishing line) and tied a clothes pin on the end. We all remember doing things like this growing up, and what a good way to keep them anxiously engaged!

We let them ‘fish’ for their snack, which were Swedish fish in little snack size baggies, then after they were done eating, we let them fish for ‘real fish’ which were actually just the fish printout that was in the manual too, cut into 4ths so that each child could go fishing more than once to get all four fish and then color them. I sat behind the curtain while my husband had all the kids line up single file (we’re working on waiting our turns, being polite and reverent) and it was a huge success!

This was the first week since we’ve been teaching this class that the kids didn’t want to go home! Some even cried when they had to leave! I know that this is an activity that we will be doing over and over again this year, now… only how to apply it to lessons?!?