Baby Moses

So I'm going back through some photos I've taken throughout the first year of JAM and noticed quite a few lessons that haven't made it to the blogosphere yet! One of the first big units we did was all about Moses, and we started out with the story of baby Moses in the basket.


Our craft for the week was inspired by the plethora of paper plates we had lying around that were taking up some serious space in the craft closet. We decided to make some "baskets" for Moses out of these plates! We used one and a half plates per basket: the one that was cut in half was stapled on top of the full plate, making a sort of "pocket" in between them.


In that pocket we cut circles of beige paper for Moses' head, which the kids decorated. We also cut out cylinders for his arms peeking out of the basket. I added grass to the back of mine to make it more realistic - the kids were not so into making weeds!

They did, however, love the watercolors to finish off the project!

For our less artistic kids, we had a couple other options. We closed down our "Build It" station for the day but we did let them act out being Pharaoh's daughter taking care of Moses, by practicing taking care of baby dolls. We also played "Hide in the Weeds" for our more active kids - They took turns hiding the baby in the basket (actually my example from the craft) around the room, and the others pretended to be Pharaoh's men and search for it. They actually had a ton of fun with this game and wanted to play for a looooong time!

Trudging Through Judges: Samson!

We've finally reached a recognizable Judge!


Now, don't get me wrong - I actually love the book of Judges and think it's chock-full of awesome characters. However, they are not all the best examples or stories for kids. Enter Samson! The kids had so much fun reading about the crazily strong man who was so strong because of God.

You can see our craft for the day on their heads - We made ourselves some long hair just like Samson, in the hopes it would make us tougher! I simply cut out long strips of paper and stapled them to fit their heads, then stapled a regular piece of construction paper to the strap and cut out strips so it resembled hair. Quick, easy, and on to the races!

We let our goofy sides out today and participated in some truly ridiculous "strong man" relays. We had contests for jumping jacks, sit-ups, push-ups, yoga poses, running, lifting, you name it. They loved it! Our relays worked like a tournament and each "place" earned you a certain amount of points.

The Ten Commandments

Last week we did a fabulous job learning about the Ten Commandments! The kids had 4 choices:

Play It: I drew a footprint and a number between 1 and 10 on ten different colors of paper. On the back side, I wrote the commandment that corresponds with that number. The papers were set up in a circle and we walked around the papers to music. When the music stopped, each kid was standing on a piece of paper. If they could correctly name the commandment, they got to keep that piece of paper. If they didn't know it, the paper stayed in play. We played until we ran out of commandments and the kid with the most commandments won!

Make It: We used this super creative craft from Calvary Kids. The kids were amazed at the chance to make their own iPhones! On each number, they drew a picture to represent that commandment.

Act It: We practiced our 10 Commandments using these fun hand signals. I put them all together in a printable to help the kids remember them and practice at home.

Build It: For this activity, we pulled out one of the kids' favorite toys: cars and racetrack! We placed traffic signs all along the track to be "rules" that the cars had to follow - just like we have to follow the 10 Commandments.

Easter: New and Improved Version!

You guys, the Easter egg hunt this year was SO - FLIPPING - AWESOME! It was a beautiful day, we had a HUGE turnout (a little too huge.... WAY more than we were expecting and had prepared for!) and the kids had an awesome time. We've started holding our egg hunt the Saturday before Easter, and this year we had 60 kids show up. Woo hoo!

Everyone started outside for the egg hunt. The hunt itself was especially awesome this year because we'd cleared a trail in the woods behind our church for the Haunted Trail in the fall, so we were able to use that same trail for the hunt! WAY easier than trying to stage a difficult egg hunt on the lawn where there are literally no natural places to hide anything. We continued with the very successful tradition of color-controlling our eggs: Each kid could find 1 of each of the 7 colors of eggs, plus any multi-colored eggs they found. (Allegedly, the multi-colored eggs were supposed to be more difficult to find... Not sure if that was actually true or not!) To help the kids keep on track with what they were looking for, each one got a book mark with the 7 colors listed.

What's inside the eggs, you ask? Well, since this is a church-sponsored event, I feel like I have to give this pretty secular tradition a Christ-centered spin. So, inside each egg, along with a small prize, was one paper egg with a letter on it. I used these gorgeous eggs from Simply Home Blog! Since I only had 7 eggs, though, a full set, when unscrambled, spelled out the words "JESUS IS." The kids were then asked to answer the question, "Who is Jesus to you?"

The prizes mostly came from Oriental Trading Company, and included: an Easter story finger puppet, a cross necklace, an Easter sticker, a "Jesus Loves You" bracelet, an eraser, and of course, some candy. Each of the multicolored eggs were stuffed full of candy!

Once the kids finished the hunt, there were helpers waiting at the finish line to usher them into the gym for activities! Our activities were as follows:

• Regular egg dying (that is, egg dying with normal dye)

• Egg dying using SHAVING CREAM - A huge hit, although not nearly as effective as regular egg dying. But did the kids care?! No way! They had a blast following these steps for shaving cream egg dyeing. We also had more kids take their eggs home this year because a very thoughtful Sunday School teacher had left us a cut-up egg carton for transport!

• A Play-Doh table complete with Easter props from Life Over Cs

• Our largest felt board with Easter pieces from My Wonder Studio

• An Easter grass sensory table with small Easter-themed objects

• A make-your-own jelly bean bag with this cute printable and poem

• And this SUPER adorable giant "Real Easter Bunny" adapted from Happy Home Fairy!

Happy Easter, everyone!

Daniel in the Lions' Den

Daniel, Daniel, Daniel, Daniel, Daniel in the lions' den!

We had so much fun with this lesson! Even though the kids mostly were already familiar with the story, we started by reading through it in the kids' storybook Bible.

Then we had 3 activity options:

Make It: I got this idea from Flame Creative Kids: protection pictures! We marked a symbol- a letter or a simple picture- with tape on a paper plate. Then we colored over the entire plate with crayons. After we peeled off the tape, we found that the symbol we'd made had been protected - just like Daniel was protected by God!

Play It: This was one of our best games yet! We had one "lion," who got a soccer ball. The rest of us were trying to protect our own Daniel: a tennis ball balanced on top of an upside-down cup. The lion tried to bump Daniel off the cup, while the kids tried to protect him!

Build It: We built dens for the lions out of foam blocks.

Manna from Heaven!

We had a record high number of kids at our JAM program this week, so it was a great time learning about the Israelites wandering the wilderness and getting manna from heaven! Our message was that God always provides for us, and that He answers our prayers- just like he did for the Israelites.

After learning our story and talking about the message, the kids had 3 choices:

Make It: We followed this cool tutorial to show the path we thought the Israelites may have taken through the wilderness. We drew the path in white crayon and then covered the paper in water colors to reveal the line. 

Play It: I got this game from this awesome blog. We raced to pick up cotton balls ("manna") with a spoon - a real challenge for the littler kids!

Act It: We used Playmobil figures to represent the Israelites wandering in the desert, and goldfish crackers as the manna from heaven. The kids loved playing God and dumping that manna down!

The Parable of the Sower

This morning one of my Sunday school teachers said to me (no joke), "I'm so excited we're learning about the sower today! This is my favorite lesson!"

And that pretty much set the tone for the whole morning. All our teachers were using their super creative juices today...

Planting grass seeds in cups of dirt (talking, of course, about what plants need to grow and what WE need to grow)

Decorating flowers with seeds and... pipe cleaners? I didn't get the full story on the "why" behind the pipe cleaners, but they looked cool!

Coloring seed packets to take home

And the older kids wrote their own parable today! Awesome!