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?!?

Coloring Time Game

For the last couple of weeks, we have been trying out a new ‘game’ during coloring time. The kids in our class have a tendency to all happen to want the same color each and every time we color. Our budget (Primary budget or my own pocket book) doesn’t allow us to have a set of crayons for each child in the class. However, our new ‘game’ means that each child randomly gets a crayon without anyone seeing it ahead of time (the popular pink and purple ones always get in there somehow…) and they get color time with that crayon until the teacher says “SWITCH”. Each child must switch crayons with another child in the classroom; they cannot keep the crayon more than one turn. It is not required to color using this crayon, but you must hold it and keep it until a teacher says the magic word “SWITCH” and then you may get another color from another child. This not only keeps coloring time under a good schedule, but alleviates melt downs over the coveted Pink and Purple crayons that are oh-so-popular in our Primary class. The children also seem to enjoy this sharing process and it’s helping take care of other sharing problems that we have had in the past as well, without us ever having to have the “let’s share” discussion with the kids.