Sunday, March 2, 2008

RVCkids and patience?

Teaching patience to 5 and 6 yr olds is always funny. Today's lesson was on God promising Abraham and Sarah a baby, and then the birth of Isaac. Ann and I both found it a difficult lesson, as there wasn't an abundance of great material on the story. In the interest of not wanting to explain reproduction or polygamy to little kids, I had to skim some of the story and chose to focus on Sarah and Abraham's patience, and how nothing is impossible with God. However, because of the events of the past week, I didn't prep my lesson well and had to come up with an activity to teach patience on the spot. My brilliant idea: play connect four with all 6 people, but turns were taken one at a time going around the circle, and no one but the teacher could talk. I spent so much time saying "It's not your turn right now so please take your chip back, isn't it hard to be patient!" Teaching five year olds patience is just funny, as they don't seem to posses that fruit of the spirit yet. I found myself getting frustrated because they weren't being patient and waiting their turn. Of course, I then realized I wasn't being patient either! I was expecting 5 yr olds to learn patience instantly. It seems that I'm always learning some kind of personal lesson while teaching the little ones, and it almost always involves patience. Maybe I should play some more connect four with 5 yr old kids.

2 comments:

Kim said...

I am STILL learning about patience. I'm a slow learner apparently. :-)

Ann said...

Yup, I think I learn more in Kid's church than in big people's church...

BTW, Henry got the lesson, he was lecturing Harmony about patience (while being impatient with her :))