Grande Finale Fun

Today I had the year end party with a group of my Sunday School girls. Sharing summer plans, thanking God for everything we could think of that starts with "n", pizza and juice boxes and a super fun craft!! Cards made from THE most amazing and fun sparkly design scrapbook paper I found at Winners. The girls just LOVE fun paper. It inspires them to make beautiful creations. Talking about beautiful creations...they are each a masterpiece - God's "workmanship" as I've been teaching them from Ephesians 2:10. That's probably been my main verse over the last 10 years or so to teach from. I've been working with some of these girls for a number of years now.

They are an absolute delight. As you can clearly see!!

(Oh - some of these pictures are from last class when we made wise owl cupcakes - also a fantastically fun and delicious craft which was thoroughly enjoyed!)

This was the first time I taught Grade 5 & 6 and I found it to be much more of a challenge than the younger ages. But what I've found over my many years of teaching kids is that they just really want to be loved and listened to. (some of those girls have LOOOONG stories to tell and there is usually not the time to give them all free reign and then there's ME who loves to talk more than most of them!!!)

They love to do fun crafts and they love stuff that's all about them. So over the years we've created "All About Me" posters, memorized lots of Bible verses about how special they are to God, eaten lots of yummy snacks, sung songs and learned to listen for the voice of Jesus.

The memorizing has surely been a very great help to me. I try to teach the girls with actions, songs and rhythm to help those verses STICK! I realized after I started studying learning styles that God had me teaching to all the learning styles without even realizing it! So cool and those tricks sure help me too. And then there was the part of every class devoted to the fun of being THANKFUL!! Because the way we enter His Sweet Presence is with thanksgiving in our hearts! So.... we began almost every class by thinking of things that we usually didn't remember to thank God for. This year we did that by taking a different letter of the alphabet for every class and finding things starting with that letter to say thank you to Jesus for. Here is my class helper standing next to a sampling of what we discovered we were thankful for. A really great exercise if you ask me!!

I've often felt like a failure if the class doesn't go as I had hoped or if I wasn't able to come up with amazing crafts or stories or, or, or.... But in the end I trust that the fruit will be good. Jesus just asks us to be faithful with our little gifts, to bring them to Him with love in our hearts and to trust the results to Him. It's that little problem with perfectionism or being a high achiever and I hope one day I'll be free of that. Until then I just need to coach myself along and remember the truth about "faith expressing itself through love". Doesn't have to be perfect. It sure needs to be loving though if it's going to bear the right kind of fruit!

And it was super easy to love those girls. May God remind them of His Word that they have "hidden in their hearts" in the years to come.