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Reply to "The Greatest Commandment - Miscellaneous Lesson Ideas"


Catherine, one of our most prolific volunteers, posted this back in 2002 in response to "how to come up with ideas for lessons. It's really a WONDERFUL description from a renown lesson writer. 

 

Catherine writes:

Whenever I'm stumped, I try to establish the concepts we want the kids to "get" from a story. Ideas seem to flow from approaching the story this way.

For example, in the passage of the greatest commandment, a concept might be: God wants us to serve God with EVERYTHING we have.

 

"Everything" Game Idea:


So then, what about handicapping the kids in some way and ask them to complete a simple task.

  • set up 2 relay teams to see how many children can race to the end of the room and back in 2 minutes. One team can only use one foot, hopping. The other group is free to run.
  • mix up all their shoes in a pile and tell them to find their shoes using only 1 hand


How is running a race with one foot or putting on shoes with one hand like serving God using only part of yourself instead of "Everything"??

How much more might we do if we used all of ourselves? The running team who were not handicapped accomplished a whole lot more.

For older kids, you can make a stronger point by setting up the 2 teams putting lots of kids on one team and fewer kids on the other. Tell them the objective is to get as many kids as possible through the relay in a set amount of time. The kids on the team with fewer kids will groan and protest. THEN tell them the rules, the larger team can only use one foot.

Obviously the team with fewer kids will accomplish much more because they are using everything they have to acomplish the task. Great discussions can follow.

"Everything" Cooking

 

What would cookies taste like if we made them using only some of the ingredients?


You could create several DIFFERENT recipes for the same cookie and see if the kids can guess which ingredient was left out of the other recipes (they'll probably guess which were left out of there's).  Go ahead and leave out things like sugar in one recipe, and flour in another.  Add something bad tasting like extra bicarb. Should be a very interesting taste-testing and opportunity to talk about the Great Commandment's LIST of what you need.


 

A representative of Rotation.org reformatted this post to improve readability.

 

Last edited by Rotation.org Lesson Forma-teer
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