Fruit of the Spirit Cornucopia

The Sunday School team has, of course, decided to go with a theme of Thanksgiving for the month of November. Our morning service only has a handful of kids and they've all put things they are thankful for on feathers and attached it to the big turkey. They've also done hands of praise that are posted on the wall leading upstairs to the Sunday school area.
I was thinking what I'll do. I don't want it to be completely redundant-especially because the thanksgiving message is a pretty generic one-gives thanks. Not to say that is a bad lesson to learn (clearly it isn't), but I don't want to beat a dead horse.

So I've come up with quite the creative blending of ideas (at least, I hope it's creative...I've never heard of it before...)
Fruit-of-the-Spirit-Cornucopia
We'll start the lesson by reading about the fruit of the Spirit that shows in our life when we are letting God live through our lives (Galatians 5:19-26). I'll hand out the cornucopia craft.
I found a pretty neat cornucopia printable (click here).
The kids will first color the sheets. As we color the sheets we'll talk about how each aspect of the fruit looks in our lives.  (What does it look like to love like Jesus loved? What does it look like to be patient? kind? What is self-control? How can we show self-control in our lives?) The kids will cut out the fruits and begin to glue them to the cornucopia. As we do this, we will label each piece with a different fruit of the Spirit.
We will put the title "We're Thankful for God in US" at the top.
We'll wrap up the lesson with the following scripture, "Let us not become weary in doing good, for at the proper time we will reap a harvest if we do not give up." (Galatians 6:9) I'm going to provide the kids with a print out of this scripture and we'll attach it to the crafts. We'll talk about what it means for us to keep doing good, even when it's hard, because we will reap a harvest- (Here's a fun thing to think about: What is your favorite fruit or vegetable? What if one day that fruit decides it was taking too long to grow. So long, in fact, that it got tired of waiting and decided it was done growing. Will it make a tasty treat for someone? No-fruit doesn't taste it's best when it isn't ripe. God has started a good work in us. Let's not grow weary or tired of letting Him work in us. It may take a long time, but we'll turn out nice and ripe if we don't give up on letting Him grow in us.) - a plentiful harvest!

I hope that's not too many themes for one lesson. We'll see...
One last thing, at some point we'll sing that song that Keith Green sings:

I will enter His gates with Thanksgiving in my heart
I will enter His courts with praise
I will say this is the day that the Lord had made
I will rejoice for He has made me glad

You can check out a youtube video of the song here.

Hope this helps someone out there. Blessings!

First Day Flop

I taught my first Sunday School lesson a month ago. What a complete failure! I'm not used to little kids. I mean, well, I'm an elementary school teacher (in-training), but I started off as a secondary education major. I was going to teach high school biology. But, somewhere near the end of my junior year (I don't know why it took so long to decide) I changed to elementary education.
That being said, I'm not used to little kids-little little kids.
One semester I had a placement in a kindergarten classroom. Every week like clockwork I was asked to do math with one of the girls. Every week I made her cry. And every week I tried to explain to her that crying wasn't going to help the situation, she just needed to do the math. On the reference from my mentor teacher at the end of that semester she said that I had the patience of an angel. LOL. Now, I don't know how true that is.
I've worked at a summer camp for most of my teen to adult life. Almost every summer at the end of the season party I receive the award "Most likely to discipline a random child in public."
I'm not the most gracious of people.
And yet, I volunteered to work a week of Sunday School at my church's morning service once a month.

This blog is my attempt to document my progress and my lessons. It is my hope that somehow this blog turns out to be a resource for others looking for Sunday School lessons. Feel free to take any and all ideas ;)