Jesus Said Let the Children Come

picture from www.sermons4kids.com

This week's topic was Jesus and the Children.  This story, in sum, is where Jesus is meeting the crowds.  Children attempt to reach Jesus, but the disciples turn them away, probably trying to be of assistance to Jesus in keeping them out of the way.  Jesus tells the disciples to let the children come to me, and tells them that in fact all people should come to Jesus as a child would. 
Kids don't have the level of doubt, and questioning that adults have, at the age we work with, they just accept Jesus as presented, and have unconditional faith in their love of Jesus.

For our class, we started out with a coloring book from our New Testament Make and Take Bible Stories, which you can purchase from my Amazon site by clicking the link.  These small coloring books are a great intro activity for our kids, we have them color them until all the kids arrive and we are ready for circle time (and at the end of the class should we have extra time).  They are a great take-home representation of what was covered in class, and the stories our basic enough that even though they are not specifically Catholic, they have worked fine in our class.

In the circle, after opening with prayer, we read the kids the story of Jesus and the Little Children from our Children's Bible.  We then retold the story giving all the kids puppets and having most of them be children, a few be disciples and the teacher was Jesus.  We had the kids come to Jesus, the disciples stop them, and then Jesus going and welcoming the children.  We did this a few times because it was simply fun to play with puppets and it reinforced the story.  We completed some discussion questions taken from an online lesson plan I found at the Birmingham Church's website , specifically the questions following the story on Page 3.

After the story, we played a modified version of Red Light, Green Light.  We made a hand help stop sign, using wooden rulers as the handle, and one side of the sign being green poster board and the other side being red poster board in an octagon-type shape.  On the green side, we pasted a picture of Jesus and the children and the words "Let the Children Come."  On the red side, we pasted a picture of the diciples, and the word "STOP."  The game was then "let the children come" (green light) and "stop" (red light).  We played this several times so that all the kids could be the sign holder.

For the craft project, each child made their own signs.  We preassembled the signs with the poster board cut outs and ruler, and had the kids just color their pictures and cut out the words and glue it on to the signs.

Here are the pictures we used: 
               Jesus With the Children (from the Beginner's Bible website) for the green side.  I reduced
                 this by 50% on the copy machine.

               Disciples (from Sermons4kids website) for the red side.  No size altering was needed.

Here are the photos and the text in one document, pre-sized, for ease of use.

              





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