A New Home and a New Creation

Of course, starting a brand-new Sunday-school format, what better place to start than at the very beginning—with God creating all things?

I thought preparation was going to be easy, mainly translation, as I’d purchased a tested & well-received curriculum from the US.  But I don’t know what my problem is; I’m notorious for not doing very well with teaching lessons right out of someone else’s book.  Means a lot more work for me but at least then I feel comfortable teaching it.

So: what did we do? First, even though we all knew each other, we had everyone write his/her name on a sheet of origami paper (so they could choose their own color & design) and spent some time giving each one a chance to sort through the pile of names and deliver them to the correct person.  During the last person’s turn, we slipped in an extra name tag that said “God”.  Who do you give this name tag to?  We can’t see God!  But we know He is real because we can see the things that He has made, so today we will look at how He created the whole world and everything in it.

Right away we found a benefit of the move to our new location.  The bathrooms have no windows!  So when we explained how dark everything was when God first created the world, we took everyone together into one bathroom and closed the door.  It was DARK!  But when God said “Let there be light,” which we all repeated, there was light—i.e., I turned on a flashlight.  We were all thankful that God created light so we could see things!

Okay, now that we can see, what did God’s world look like.  It was all water!  We had a plastic tub full of water & dropped a little plastic doll into it, to show that this wasn’t yet ideal for breathing.  So God on the second day separated the waters on the earth and the waters of the sky: we all took turns ladling water out of the first tub into a second tub which we placed on top of the first one.  That was the second day.  On the third day, God separated the water and the dry land on the earth:  everyone helped pour the rest of the water from tub #1 into different bowls marked ocean, river, and lake.  Then we put a florist’s brick (or whatever you call those green things you can stick stems into when arranging flowers) in the bottom of the tub.  On that day God also caused green plants to spring up from the earth.  So everyone got a tree or a flower on a toothpick to plant on the earth.

On the fourth day, God took the light He had created and organized it into a sun for the daytime, and a moon and stars for the nighttime: first we stuck light blue paper onto one side of the sky tub, and black paper onto the other side, then added sun, moon and star stickers.

On the fifth day, God made creatures to go in the earth’s water—cutout plastic fish—and in the sky’s “water”—bird stickers.

On the sixth day, He made all kinds of animals, also on toothpicks that we all got to stick into the earth, along with the final creatures, a man and a woman.

 

On the seventh day, God rested.  What do you like to do when you’re relaxing?  Besides sleep, which is what everyone answered.  Eat, of course!  So, like God, first we created these edible bugs, and then relaxed and ate them!

 

After we ate, it was time to sing a song:  God created X X X, X X X, X X X, God created X X X, we give thanks to Him.  We put the song up on the board and for each of quite a few verses, stuck up a different picture of some aspect of God’s creation—whatever I could make have exactly three syllables, ha!—and sang about that.

And that took our whole hour!  I had planned a couple more activities but things took longer than I expected.  This is NOT a problem since one brilliant aspect of the new curriculum is the suggestion to use two Sundays in a row to teach the same truth.  So I am half prepared for next Sunday already, nice deal!  (In fact, I now plan to stretch this theme out to three Sundays, with the last one focusing on how God created people, and how that is why He loves each one of us so much.)