Winging it...

Yesterday I walked into my SS class and wondered just where all the children were! While the numbers were better than last week (one child showed!), they were still down. I only had 4 kiddos in class... summer vacations are definitely taking a toll on the numbers! Now, I had prepared a lesson on the Wise Man and Foolish Man last week, and I opted out of it with just one student... she went to another class. I opted out of it again this week... I really need more numbers to do what I want to do.... so I decided to "wing it".

I asked the kids who showed up what their favorite bible story was... hands down the story of Noah. So off we went... on a Noah adventure! We talked about God asking Noah to build the Ark... we talked about the fact that when God said it would rain, it had NEVER rained in Noah's lifetime... the ground had ALWAYS been watered from below.... then we talked about the SIZE of the Ark... try explaining THAT one to first graders.... the 4th graders... they understood a little better. Then we talked about all the animals that were on the Ark.... and we made a list of all the ones we could come up with. Then I told that that it only scratched the surface of the number present.

Then we got into logistics... what would they need to survive... and not just for 40 days and 40 nights... if you add up the time they were on that Ark for over a YEAR... I think it was 379 days that we came up with!!! So they would need LOTS of food for all of the animals... and some of the animals that came along had to BE food for other animals such as lions, tigers, ... you get the picture. Then I asked them, "If an animal eats, and digests the food, what happens next?"... blank stares were all around the room... then I saw a light bulb pop... yep... "They poop!" Oh yeah... as one of the boys put it... "that's a LOT of poop". The girls were pretty freaked out about the bug issue... that is a LOT of bugs in one place too!!!

Then one boy asked, "What about all the OTHER people? What happened to them?" and I told him... "Because of their sins, they all died. Only 8 people remained on the WHOLE earth... along with the animals that God would use to refill the earth with MORE animals." The obvious next question.... "We have floods today... will be all die?"

Then we talked about rainbows... and God's covenant with His children....

What child hasn't drawn a rainbow at some point? Or seen one on a rainy, sunny day?? And I told them that God promised us that he would NEVER destroy the entire earth by that means again. This didn't mean that there will never be floods, just that he will NEVER use one to take out the entire world. And we talked about the fact that once God made that covenant, he had to watch as the world once again returned to its sinful ways... but that he had a plan in place already... and he would send his Son to die on the cross for our sins.

I handed out paper and crayons and showed them how to draw a picture of the Ark... the mountain it landed on... and I added a rainbow and the dove we had talked about, holding an olive branch. Then I turned them loose to work on their own pictures. As one of the boys was finishing up his rainbow he asked, "Mrs. Lynn, can I add a sun? You have to have a sun to make the rainbow work!" And as I told him of course... I wondered if he really understood what he had just told me....

"You have to have the SON to make the rainbow (promise) work."

Gotta love working with kids... sometimes they just have a way of taking an hour long lesson and bringing it down to just a few words!!!!