Lesson 23: God wants us to...be thankful

Even though it's not quite Thanksgiving season, this lesson fit perfectly with our family right now.  Being thankful/grateful is something we've been talking to Jenna about so it was the perfect time for a Bible lesson about it!

1.  Verse - "Oh give thanks to the Lord, for He is good."  Psalm 107:1

Jenna asked why there was a pumpkin, and I told her because it reminds us of Thanksgiving, which is a holiday about being thankful.
(I still haven't found our other verse cards, which have become misplaced in the move!  I'm hoping they show up this weekend, when we organize the basement.)

2.  Lesson -

• Pray with your child about the lesson.
• Read the verse.
• God wants us to be thankful.
• What does it mean to be thankful?
• God gives us many wonderful things.  What are some wonderful things that God has given us? 
• God gives us good things because he loves us!  When God gives us good things, they are called "blessings."  We should be thankful to God for all our blessings.  We need to tell God, "thank you."
• God also wants us to be thankful to other people.
• When people give us things, or do nice things for us, or help us, God wants us to be thankful to them.  That's why we say, "thank you" to each other and write thank you cards.  
• For example, when one of you teachers helps you with something at preschool, you should tell them thank you!  Or when Nana sends you something special, we write her a thank-you note. 
• God wants us to be thankful all the time, to him and to other people.
• Another word for "thankful" is "grateful."

3. Craft - "I am thankful" tree
I found the most perfect craft for this lesson on Ministry-to-Children.com!  It really is a blessing to find free crafts like this online and it was exactly what I was looking for!  So, I am thankful to them ;)
Here's the link: http://ministry-to-children.com/thanksgiving-coloring-pages/print/
It's two pages, a tree and leaves.

 Fill in the leaves with things that you're child is thankful for, cut them out and glue them on the tree.  (Jenna did the coloring and gluing and I had her practice cutting by cutting out a few of the leaves.)
This was Jenna's finished product:

4. Song - "Praise Him, Praise Him" #31 on Wee Sing Bible Songs

5.  End by reviewing the new verse one more time!

Review Lesson

As I mentioned in my last "taking a break" post, my next lesson would be coming to you from my new dining room!  So, just to give you a visual, here it is :-)

This was one of my favorite features of the new house because this table was a wedding present from my parents and the for the 8 years we've been married, we've never been able to sit all the way around it!  It's always been pushed up against a wall in an eat-in kitchen.  This is just one of the many ways God has blessed us!  (This is completely off the subject, but I'm in the process of redoing all the chairs, painting them red...that's why they're all unmatching right now!)  So, the girls and I sat down right here this morning and did our lesson! 

As I began planning this lesson last night, I felt completely off my game.  First of all, our Bible verse cards (which I specifically did not pack early because I wanted to keep track of them) have become lost in the move!  And I had no idea where the storybook Bibles were or my "Bible lessons" spiral notebook.  I also had been thinking that Jenna probably didn't remember anything because it had been so long and she's been completely obsessed with Wonder Pets lately and thinking of little else!  SO, because of this I decided to do a review lesson today.

Also, I used a new book today to help with the review.  It's The Baby Bible Storybook.   These books are so cute for toddlers and I had recently picked this up at a consignment shop to use for Madeline.  I used it today because Jenna loves it too, and it gives really brief reviews of the stories we had already done.

Review Lesson
1.  Verse - no new verse.  I need to find our other verses before our next lesson!!

2. Lesson -

• Pray with your child about the lesson.
• Review the Bible stories that you've already taught.  I did this by reading the first three stories out of The Baby Bible Storybook, "God Made Everything," "Noah and the Animals," "God's promise to Abraham and Sarah."  (These were all just one short page, so this didn't take very long to do.)
• Review all the previous lessons by going through our Bible Crafts binder. (This is a notebook we've put together of all of Jenna's Bible lesson crafts.)

3.  Craft - Writing Practice
Since the point of today was really to review names and stories, I decided to do something a little different and have Jenna practice writing/tracing the names from our stories.  If you go to this handwriting website, you'll find a worksheet generator for you to type in any words and it will print them as print-dot letters to use for writing practice.  I used the "Paragraph Worksheet Maker" and typed in "Adam and Eve, Noah and the Ark, Tower of Babel, Abraham and Sarah, Isaac."  Then Jenna traced the letters as we talked about each name. 

It was something different and it worked well for the review.

4.  Song -
I asked Jenna what she wanted to sing and she chose "The Noah song."  So we sang the "Who built the ark?" song from the Wee Sing Bible Songs cd.  (#29)


I hope this review lesson is helpful to you in some way!  I'm gonna go on a hunt for our Bible verse cards and plan a new lesson for next time! 
Bye for now!

Consider it all joy...

Hi friends! 
As I mentioned in my last post, I've had to take a break from our home Bible lessons because we moved two weeks ago.  I am determined to start those up again this week (on Tuesday), but in the mean time, I wanted to give you all a quick update. 

If I could describe my last four weeks in two words, I would say intense and chaotic.  First we packed our whole house and moved in two weeks, but on top of that there has been a complication (requiring an exterminator) with the new house which has made settling in extra difficult.  And on top of that, Madeline, my little one, decided to start protesting sleep time and figured out how to climb out of her crib!  Any mom of a toddler knows this brings on one response from the parents...AAAAAAH!!!  She is 21 months old and I had every intention of waiting til she was at least two to make the wonderful transition to a big girl bed.  So, this came as quite a shock to me.  House in boxes and general disarray, exterminator issues, two little ones, and sleep training one all over again...in a toddler bed.  **deep breath**

Now, remember the title of my post?  "Consider it all joy..."   I am coming off of an amazing year of studying Acts and the epistles through Bible Study Fellowship and then a summer, 8-week Beth Moore study on the book of James.   God has done immense work on my heart and, dare I say, changed my life through these studies.  And a few months ago, I wrote James 1:2-4 on a pink post-it note and hung it above my sink.  Then I set it to the tune of "Happy Birthday" and memorized it. 

"Consider it all joy, my brethren when you encounter various trials.  Knowing that the testing of your faith produces endurance and let endurance have its perfect result.  So that you may be perfect and complete lacking in nothing." 

These verses stuck out to me because they are help to get through trials!  Trials have a purpose, they are a test of my faith and meant to make me more perfect.  So, as I was in the middle of these relatively minor trials (and I know they are definitely minor!!) God reminded me of these verses.  Of course, I was reminded AFTER I had already given way to a lot of whining and desperation.  But that's okay!  God reminded me of his perfect Word, and his perfect plan and his purpose behind all the odd things that happen to us.  I can say now, Oh, these things are a test of my faith?  Well, then I got this!  Really, this is a pretty easy test.  A few things have shaken up my world a bit, that's all!  The good news is...God has provided us with a beautiful little house to live in (which we will be settled into someday) and God has majorly blessed me with Madeline having a very easy transition to a toddler bed and showed me a lot about her personality through it.  But even if these good things weren't so, God is still good and I am still well cared for and loved by Him and I am learning to let that be entirely enough for me. 

So, all that being said, I am trying to get back to what's important for my time...and my lessons with Jenna are one of them.  A talk at church this morning on stewardship made me consider what I'm stressing about and instead put the important things first.  For example, the curtain project I've taken on for my new living and dining rooms needs to go lower down on my priorities list...and stop causing me stress!

Anyway, that's what I've been up to the last four weeks.  God is so amazingly good and I am determined to settle my heart and be faithful to his calling in my life everyday, no matter what's going on around me.