Jesus grew up like us

Glad to see our Sunday school kids don't seem to be influenced by the heresy of Docetism.

(Although if I did this activity again, I would omit the word 'toys' because there's no proof either way, and despite the teachers suggesting that he probably did have some simple homemade toys, the kids decided he didn't, so it sits awkwardly in among the sins, doing nothing useful.)

A metaphor for life or something

Yesterday we played a game where the children had to throw a ball into a bucket. The nearest bucket earned 5 points, the middle bucket 10, and the furthest 20.

The children found this more difficult than I expected. But their different approaches were interesting. Some of the older boys refused to aim at anything other than the '20' bucket, always missed, and therefore never gained any points at all. Meanwhile, some of the others aimed at the '5' and perhaps '10', and managed to accumulate a good number of points.

Lazarus!

Jesus said to her, ‘I am the resurrection and the life. The one who believes in me will live, even though they die; and whoever lives by believing in me will never die. Do you believe this?’

John 11:25-26

Blind man at the pool of Siloam

On Sunday we did the story of Jesus healing the blind man.

Here's a game we played:

Like pin the tail on the donkey. The children were blindfolded, and had to place the 'mud' (brown paper) on the man's eyes.

Also, here's a colouring picture. We used highlighters.

Feel free to print & use for non-commercial use.

Nativity chalk art

This was a nice, easy craft for our nativity Sunday. They could choose anything they liked from the Christmas story. We've been focussing a lot on the prophecies of Jesus as king this Christmas, hence the crowns. I think the tall picture is the temple from Simeon & Anna.

You can currently get 25 sheets of black card for £1 from Poundland, which is pretty good.

Before that, we played Nativity story pass the parcel - idea from Flame Creative Kids. Though I used mostly pictures from the wise men story (not christmas cards), as we'd already done Jesus' birth and Simeon & Anna, so that was the next installment.

And because they were young children who were ever so slightly wound up, I pochled it to make sure that I got the final prize - I wasn't sure how any of them would take being told they had to share it with everyone else :-)

Moses & the Amalekites game

 And finally, the story of God helping the Israelites to beat the Amalekites.

You will need:

• A stick.

What to do:
Essentially you are playing musical bumps, but instead of music you have a stick.

1. Someone is Moses, holding up the stick.
2. Children dance round the room, miming 'fighting'.
3. When the stick is lowered, they must immediately drop to the ground 'dead'. The last one to do so is out.

They loved this!

The only issue was that sometimes the 'fighters' got tired before Moses' arms did! I wonder how that worked out in real life? Of course, the adrenaline of having real people trying to kill you might make you keep going...

Manna Sunday School

We've been learning about Moses recently.

For the manna in the desert story I had to hastily improvise a visual aid, so I used torn-up paper hankies.

 That bowl really holds an omer! It seems a huge amount for a person, but as it was evidently fairly insubstantial it probably settled a lot.

It was interesting how vague some of the children were about where our food comes from. I explained that quail were birds you can eat, like chicken. Some of them were  very surprised that the chicken we eat comes from a bird!

Very, very easy craft!!!

You will need:

• Paper plates (we had coloured ones in the cupboard, but normal white ones would be fine)
• Food catalogues / supermarket magazines
• (Optional) letter stickers
  

What to do:

1. Children cut their favourite foods from the magazines and stick them on the plate.
2. Stick on stickers (or write) to say 'Thank you God'.

Memory verse game

Print out the verse on two (or more) different colours of paper. Pictures are optional - I used babies* because the story was about hiding baby Moses.

Distribute them round the room. We used blu-tack and attached them to the walls, windows, light fittings, bookcase etc... Others were placed on chairs, under the table etc. Some can be obvious, but make some a bit tricky to find.

Divide the children into teams. The teams have to find all the words in their colour, and get them in the right order.

Boy (when his team was last collecting the words): It's not a race.
Same boy (when his team sorted them into order first): We won!

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*Template from Remember Remember from the Good Book Company.

Odd one out game

This game was to go with a lesson on Daniel - about how sometimes if we love & obey God we'll be the odd one out.

The children took turns to pick out the odd one out from each set of things. Some were easy. Some were a bit tricky. (The one where they had to choose between 3 English Narnia books and one French Narnia book was well-nigh impossible!)