How to safely contract leprosy

This morning the 5th grade girls in my class had a great time and so did I. We were learning that God cares about us personally from Matthew 8:1-3. I asked for a brave volunteer… and got lots of eager, waving hands. The rest of the class used stickers to give her leperous spots. Then we talked about how it couldn't be cured and our volunteer said the stickers were a little uncomfortable. So then we dabbed on a variety of lotions, but sadly she still wasn't cured. So she was sent to exile in the back of the room in an out of the way corner. Through the avalanche of giggles we read the verses about how Jesus responded to the leper and invited our leper to rejoin the group and remove her spots.

Jesus calms the storm rain-maker craft

Last month, we tried to float sponges on our Sea of Galilee in basin before our lesson in the two year old room. The sponges didn't float, and neither did the children, but both were equally wet.

Here's the part of the lesson that did work like it was supposed to. We were learning about how Jesus calmed the storm. During the lesson we made lots of noise for the rain and the thunder and the waves. After the lesson we colored the clouds and make our own rain-makers using:

• plastic containers from the dollar store

• coloring picture of clouds. Here's mine.

• beads and tin foil bits to sound like rain... other things would probably work fine too. I didn't want them to try to eat beans, I had the beads on hand and they look kinda cool.

• packaging tape to make sure that the lids stayed on even if someone got curious about the beads

How to get Goliath to visit your class…

This week our church Bible story material gave me the story of David and Goliath from 1 Samuel 17 to teach to our eager group of 2 year olds. It provided a card-board cut out of David and one of his sheep, but Goliath apparently went missing last year.

Before class, I had some of my favorite 3 and 5 year old helpers help me measure out 8 feet on the cement block wall in our class. Then I used masking tape to make a life-size figure of Goliath on the wall. Next time I'll have to shoot pics, but he was just a little better than a stick figure. He immediately got lots of attention from all ages. My little Davids had a great time hitting him with paper-wad rocks at the end of class. (Hope nobody threw things at their siblings when they got home.)

I got a coloring page from here (but we didn't get to it because we were having too much fun).