Playing Favorites
Actividades del grupo

Sermon Title: "Playing Favorites"

Scripture Reading:James 2:1-10

OLYMPICS:

Let each child or group of children decide on a game to play OLYMPICS with their class. Let them know that each child and idea of a DIFFERENT game is great - all the games are important. Children can pick a running game, or a throwing game or a 3 legged race, or blowing bubbles, etc.

TUG OF WAR:

Divide the children up with tall and short, big and little children for each side. Let children know that ALL of their sizes are very important to this tug of war game.

SPECIAL SPORTS:

Tell the children that each of them will create and pantomime and play a special sport of their own choice. Each sport will be SPECIAL and fun to play. After the child has shown his own special sport, all the children can try to imitate. Continue to play for as long as time allows. Children might choose fishing, golfing, basketball, soccer, football, etc.

KIDS CUT OUTS:

Provide children with several colors of paper. Children can trace and cut out a "person" and then decorate each of their cut outs with various colors of yarn for hair, markers for eyes, buttons glued on for their clothes, pieces of different colored felt on their shoes, etc. Tell children that each cut out child is special, no matter what they are wearing or how they look, including hair, shoes, etc.

CRAYON TOWN:

Children can be given many colors and shapes and even broken crayons. Divide the children into smaller groups to develop each group of crayons into a town and smaller crayons can be children, etc. Encourage children to talk about all the various types and shapes of crayons but all are very important to "Crayon Town".

COLORED HEART CHAIN:

Provide children with many colors of construction paper, wall paper, doilies, sand paper, etc. Children will cut out heart shapes and then begin taping them to a door or a wall to make a LONG chain, with all the hearts being very different but all very important to the heart chain. Children can write words from today's Bible lesson on their hearts to tell the story as the heart chain develops.

GRAPE AND SPECIAL FINGER PRINTS:

Children can place their fingers in "purple" ink pads and push their fingers down on a piece of paper. Encourage children to draw many various faces and bodies to their finger prints and write GRAPE SPECIAL CHILDREN instead of GREAT (grape). Write words from today's Bible verse around the edge of their GRAPE children pictures.

SPECIAL BOOKLET:

Each child can be given several pieces of paper to staple together to form a booklet. I AM SPECIAL can be written on the front of their booklet. Each page can then have a picture of one characteristic of the child. Ex: one page can have the eyes either blue, green or brown; another page can have a shirt or pants, another page can have a picture of their type of hair. Another page could have a picture of the sport or hobby of that child, etc. One page could have words from today's Bible verse as well.

COLOR CLUES:

The teacher can write today's Bible verse on various colors of construction and hide these around the classroom. The teacher could give a child a color clue for the first part of today's verse, then give another child another color clue for the next part of the verse and continue until all of the Bible verse is in order and taped to the wall or to a poster board. Let children know that all the parts of the verse are very important but were all on different colors of paper or different shapes and sizes for the children to find.

M&M STORY:

Provide each child with a package of M&M's or other colorful candies. Tell the Gospel story with each color and let children know that all the candies are different color but tell a great story. Ex: Brown candies stand for sin; red candies stand for Jesus' blood, white candies stand for purity and dirty sinds washed away, green candies can stand for Christian growth, blue candies can stand for baptism and yellow candies represent heaven! Children can enjoy their candies as a snack after the Gospel Story has been told.

Song: "Jesus Loves the Little Children"

Words and Music (pdf)

MP3 Accompaniment Track