Spring Cleaning
Group Activities
Sermon Title: "Spring Cleaning"
Scripture Reading: John 2:13-22
BROOM RELAY:
Divide the children into two teams and use a broom to play a relay of pushing a cleaning bucket back and forth to the finish line.
SUPPLY BUCKET RELAY:
Children will take turns running around the room area that is designated to find 5 cleaning supplies to place in their bucket and return to their team. If there are a lot of cleaning supplies everywhere, the children can continue to play or the teacher can have a leader for each team that will take the bucket with 5 items and toss them around the room again for the next players.
HEART FINGER PAINTING:
Children will be given finger paints and paper to finger paint a large heart with many colors swirled around the heart. Children can use items given to decorate their painting or to write some important words from today's lesson. Items could be old tooth brushes, craft sticks, toothpicks, etc.
PENNY SCRAMBLE:
The teacher will have many pennies for the children to dive for around the room as the teacher says, GO! Tell children to listen carefully to today's lesson to hear what part "money" had to do with our Bible story.
HEART POCKET SEWING:
The children will trace and cut out two hearts of the same size/shape. The teacher can hole punch around the edges of the heart for children to "sew" the heart together with yarn or ribbon of choice. Let the children place small pieces of paper INSIDE the heart that they have written about today's lesson and cleaning our hearts to please JESUS.
CLEANING SKITS:
Divide the class into two teams and let each team quickly plan a skit to have the other team guess at what part of the house or church that they are CLEANING. Children could use mops and brooms from today's story time, if desired. (Examples of areas to clean could be the toilet, the church pews, a bedroom with beds and closets, etc)
CLEAN HEARTS:
Provide children with construction paper and supplies to draw and cut out a large heart to decorate and write words from today's lesson that GOD WANTS A CLEAN HEART, etc.
GARBAGE BAGS:
The teacher can have many small pieces of paper with words of things that we should not have in our lives.... The teacher can write ideas such as lies, cheating, disobeying, hitting, swearing, hurting someone's feelings and others that the teacher desires. Children will be told to find at least 5 to 10 pieces of paper around the room and place in their "garbage bag" which can be a small brown lunch bag. After the children have placed their DIRTY things in their "garbage bag", they can form a circle to talk about today's lesson and then everyone take turns in throwing their "garbage bags" in the big trash and PRAY together that GOD will keep them clean.
CLEAN MOUTHS:
The teacher can draw two very large mouths on a poster board. One mouth will say GOOD THINGS and the other mouth will say BAD THINGS. Children can take turns going to one of the mouths to write a word that is good or bad that comes out of the mouth, such as the GOOD mouth could be please, thank you, may I, come to church with me, sing praises to the Lord, call someone to encourage them..... and the BAD mouth would say bad words, lying tongue, hurtful words, singing bad music.
CLEAN ROOMS:
Let children take one of the cleaning items from our lesson today and clean a part of the classroom as time allows -- dust rags, brooms, mops, etc.
SING A SONG:
O BE CAREFUL LITTLE EYES WHAT YOU SEE, etc.
SHARE A SNACK:
The teacher can make each child a heart cookie or make a heart shaped cake for the children to enjoy at snack time.
Song: "O Be Careful Little Eyes what You See"
Words and Music (pdf)
MP3 Accompaniment Track
