Surprise! Believe

I was teaching the kids about the resurrection yesterday. There was a lot in the lesson (The whole of John 20: Mary Magdalene, Peter & John, Thomas), so I wanted some kind of structure to hold it together - and also hold the children's interest, as the resurrection is very familiar to them.

Our book started with discussing some surprising facts, which was a good lead-in.

I pointed out that, while they knew what happened next, Jesus' friends didn't, and got them to try to imagine they were living back then.

We made double-sided  flash cards like this:

Stickers from Poundland.
The only smiley faces in the packet were these ones with heart eyes!

Whenever something surprising happened in the story, we held up the 'surprise!' side, and whenever someone believed we held up the 'believe' side.

This segued really nicely into the conclusion I wanted - this term all our lessons have been from John, so I thought it would be good to finish with the reason John wrote his book:

Jesus performed many other signs in the presence of his disciples, which are not recorded in this book. But these are written that you may believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, and that by believing you may have life in his name.

John 20v30-31

I got them to look it up in the Bible, and then we filled in the blanks on this worksheet:

(You need the NIV2011 to fill this out)