Playing Catch-up

Apparently things were a bit slow at Merciful Love while we were on vacation. Well, I hope it made things easier for the leaders.

The first week (August 22) they finished up the last commandment. For the story, they used Naaman the leper, with Elisha's servant Gehazi being covetous of the gifts Naaman had offered for his healing (which Elisha had refused).

The game was about the perils of coveting too much. A pan was prepared with a paper towel spread over it and fastened in place with a rubber band. This was placed on a stool in the middle of the group. Then a bag of small stones of various sizes was passed around the group. Each person would place one stone on the paper towel in turn. The object was to see whose "coveting" of "just one more…" would tear or otherwise dislodge/destroy the prepared pan. Even the cheap paper towels we used are amazingly strong—this game works better if you dampen the paper slightly before beginning the game.

The opposite of covetousness is contentment, so the craft was cutting & pasting these "contented cats."

The next week was the review of the ten commandments. The instructions were for each family to receive one or two slips of paper listing one of the commandments and the story that had gone along with it. I really wanted the parents to try to lead their kids to act their stories out. Even if they didn't remember the story, to at least act something out that would give a clue to the commandment for others to guess which one was being portrayed. But the volunteer helper who came that week, an even bigger ham than myself, ended up capitulating and acting everything out for the others to guess. I do hope she involved some of the kids (I didn't want to ask, in case it came out too grumpy/controlling), since it would be the adults in general who would be doing the guessing.

For the game, the kids were to divide into two teams, each with the commandments written out on ten slips of paper. With our big poster board example displayed in the front, they were supposed to place them in the correct order on smaller "stone tablets," relay fashion, racing to see which team was fastest and/or most accurate.

I don't know how it went speedwise, but I did notice that neither group got them all in the right order!

Since they were now done learning the ten commandments, the kids made paper graduation hats for craft time.