This past January, Josh volunteered me to help coordinate my church's Sunday School. I spent about a month planning out the logistics and we started implementing it in March. We use the Children's Desiring God curriculum for preschoolers, which is basically a collection of lessons in the Old and New Testament.
I've learned so much from teaching our kids. Yes.. I've learned a lot from teaching Bible stories to kids ages 2-6 with our preschool curriculum. I'm not kidding you and I'm not crazy. Each lesson comes with a guide on each story. These guides have key themes which are basic truths about God and our faith, ideas for introducing the lesson, and an application section. The CDG curriculum does not come with a prewritten story that all the teachers can just read to the kids. Each lesson has a scripture reference and the teachers must read the Bible passage and write out a story on that passage for the kids.
You might be thinking that this sounds like it's a lot of work, and it is. I won't deny how time-consuming it is but it is extremely worth it. Before we started implementing Sunday School, I spent a good amount of time reading the introduction to the curriculum and articles in the CDG blog on helpful tips for preparing and teaching the lessons. CDG emphasizes repeatedly that the most effective teachers are the ones who truly believe what they're teaching because they've been convicted by what they're teaching.
You get the point, I love the curriculum! Anyways, the curriculum comes with coloring pages that the kids and teachers can color together. This is primarily designed so that the teachers can work in smaller groups with children to discuss the story. I talked to a couple of mothers about the coloring pages and we pretty much agreed that coloring pages aren't the best activities to work on with our church's children since they're all boys. We decided to have a teacher-directed activity at the end of each lesson instead. So far, all of our activities have been crafts...which could be a result of our female dominant team of teachers.
When I was preparing to teach the lesson on the Fall in Genesis 3, I struggled to think of an activity on my own that could capture the actual event, man's sinfulness, and God's promise at the same time. I didn't want to have the kids draw/construct the tree of knowledge of good and evil and have them think the take away point was, "I cannot eat apples because apples made Adam and Eve sin."
Even though Adam and Eve sinned by disobeying God, God still promised them that there will be someone who will come and defeat sin once and for all. This is very good news and what a shame it would be if the kids weren't able to remember this! I turned to Pinterest and see if there were any crafts I could use for this lesson. My first search was, "preschool crafts the fall," only preschool crafts popped up. Second search, "Bible craft the fall," came up with some cutesy crafts. Third search, "Preschool Bible crafts," nothing related to the lesson showed up. I decided to use trusty ole' Google. I still found nothing relevant.
It was then that I realized that I might never find a craft that will be able to convey everything that I wanted unless I created my own. Most of the Bible crafts that I found online were aesthetically pleasing but not necessarily true to the entire message of the story and the Bible. A lot of the crafts seemed to be focused on making angels with every kind of material you can possibly imagine or randomly find in your home.
Each week, Josh would watch me make an example of my crafts and he would then compliment me on how great he thinks my crafts are. When he compliments me, I usually think to myself, "Yeah right, you're just saying that because I'm your wife and you want me to feel good about this weird thing-a-ma-bob I made." As time passed by, people started telling me that they like the crafts (Josh, I hope you're not telling people to say this to me). I have decided to start posting my crafts with instructions on this blog as a resource for all you parents/teachers/Sunday School volunteers out there! Stay tuned tomorrow for the first craft!
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