Before the lesson started, I served donuts and water to the class and let them tell me about their weekend experiences.  They had gotten back that morning from the Spring Youth Retreat and they were all excited.  They were also all tired.  This is where I learned my first lesson of the day; the donuts were not fresh.  In fact, they were one day old because I had gotten the morning before.  I had eaten one myself that morning, but it turns out that some were a bit too hard for the youth’s liking.  Next time, fresh donuts for all!

The lesson was on Joseph, and it went fairly well but for one exception.  The class was unusually rowdy.  I chalk this up to three reason.  1) They had been up all weekend.  2) We had 9 people, which is more than we typically have in our small Sunday School room.  3) I was incorporating Bible sword drills into the lesson.

For those who don’t know, a sword drill is where I call a book, chapter, and verse out and they have to find it and be the first to stand and read.

Starting the week after next, we will begin a 6 week competition on sword drills.  Each week they have to bring their own Bible to compete.  If they win that day, they get some candy.  If they are the one that wins overall, I’m going to give that person $25.  The whole reason for the competition is to get them to bring their Bibles.

Well, I spread the sword drills throughout the lesson on Joseph, so every few minutes I would call the reference and the class would go nuts with activity.  The pro was that they were paying attention to me.  The con was calming them down after each time.  It worked well, though, in my opinion.

During the lesson, I learned another lesson myself.  Key needs sleep.  Key is a girl in my class.  Very nice and well-behaved, but very, very hyper when she is sleep deprived.

Overall, the class was good.  I’ll just remember to bring fresh donuts the next time we have them.  Also, other than the sword drills, this lesson lacked interactivity, which I don’t want to do very often.  They respond much better when they are doing more than listening.

Sorry about the delays.  With my daughter being born and then sickness, I haven’t actually been teaching much recently.  This past week, however, we talked about the story of Noah (which I mentioned in a previous post).  Considering that I didn’t have any crazy games planned or anything, I think that the class had a lot of fun (I’ll not factor in one student that kept falling to sleep).  Actually, I did have an activity of building a boat, but didn’t get to it.  We read the Scripture of the story of Noah verse by verse and just talked about it.  Afterward we talked about how one person or a group of people can make a difference and I challenged them to come up with money raising ideas to purchase an animal through Heifer International in order to change the lives of a family.  I was so excited at their excitement, and one youth, Brandon, stated confidently that he thought we could raise the full $500 to purchase a cow.  Even so, I think the idea of purchasing a water buffalo was much more appealing.  Along with the excitement of the animal, they also seem quite interested in the study of the Word, often asking great (and difficult) questions.

Sunday was the third or four lessons dealing with Miracles.  With Christmas so close, I think it was fitting to talk about Jesus.  We started off with a skit called, “On Purpose”, which was performed by members of the Drama Team in the next class up.  The point  was to to emphasize how Christ did all that He did “on purpose”.

Later, we wrote some headlines that dealt with some specific miracles in the Bible.  The one that I remember is Attack of the Flies from Exodus.

We went from there to the specific miracles that Jesus did.  Here, we talked about several miracles and asked ourselves whether they conquered nature, the physical body, or the spiritual realm.

To go along with the lesson, I handed out a sort of outline that went over each section, plus had the writing exercises directly on it.  I wanted to get something tangible in there hand to help them follow along.

After the main lesson was over, we played a few minutes of Bible Guesstures, which seemed to go over very well once they started getting the hang of it.

On both the headlines and Guesstures, it turned into a competition between the girls and boys.  This really helped the energy and atmosphere of the class.  Unfortunately, I didn’t have any prizes to hand out for the winners.  I had run out of candy bars.  I’m going to pick up some supplies this week so that I’ll have some in the future.

Overall, the lesson went relatively well.  I still feel that there is room for improvement, but I feel that I’m progressing rather than going back.  For now, I’m satisfied with that.

Sunday’s class was built around a lot of Scripture.  We were talking about a lot of miracles, and I thought it would be good for them to read it from the Bible instead of just me telling them.  That isn’t to say that was all there was, but it was a large part.  Unfortunately, it was a larger part than it should have been, because I think that I lost them after about half the class.

The first part was pretty good, because we did a little survey.  Then each student acted out a different miracle scenario while I read it from my notes.  The problem came when we started reading the scriptures.  It was very short passages, but I had two students who quickly became bored and started acting out.  Each started feeding off the other, and then the rest of the class started feeding off them.  When I looked up to see a quarter coming out of one kid’s nose (the same one that I had just told to put the quarter up when they threw it into the air.  Also, how in the world do you get a Quarter up your nose?!), I knew that was starting to lose my temper.  I didn’t lose my cool with the kids and go off or anything, but I did get flustered to the point that I couldn’t remember where I was going with my notes.  The end of the lesson, which was supposed to be meaningful, ended up fizzing out and being a dud.

So, the bad grade reflects my ability to handle the students when they get rowdy and also for the lack of physical involvement to make it more interesting for them.  Both of those are on my head.  Moving forward, I’ll have to remember to stay in control and to make the class much more interactive than it was Sunday.

I’ve also got to come up with some “Save Games”.  After I was through, we had a few minutes to blow.  We played a couple of small games, but nothing that I think they enjoyed.  I want to get a few games together that are really fun and they enjoy, that I can just pull out of the hat whenever I think we need to.

Sunday’s lesson was the start of a four week series on Miracles, and dealt specifically with the miracles of the Old Testament that dealt with Healing and Deliverance.  We started out talking about Miracles in general.  I would say something like “Your cafeteria food tastes great” or “Jesus and Peter walked on water” and they would tell me whether it was a miracle or not.  The cafeteria food one got a resounding “It’s a Miracle!”

When we talked about healing, we talked about Naaman first.  For this, Candy (spelling?) got in front of the class and yelled “Unclean!” while I talked about leprosy in the Bible.  Then we used two bowls of water, one clean and the other “muddy” so they could visualize what Naaman was going to bathe in.  I asked them which they would rather have to dip in.  Unfortunately, for my demonstration, I used coffee grinds to muddy the water, and it just so happened that all of my kids like the smell of coffee.  They kept saying they would use the dirty water.

When we got to deliverance, one of the stories we talked about was the battle between Jehoshaphat  and the kingdoms of Ammon and Moab.  Candy and Alex were Ammon and Moab and they were armed with real weapons (paper wads), while LaMonte and Barrington were armed with a toy drum and keyboard.  We played and sang while Candy and Alex had to throw the paper wads at each other, which was what happened in the battle.

I gave myself a B+ for being adequately prepared and getting them involved.  Plus, my attitude stayed positive throughout.