B is for Baptism of Jesus

At our Wednesday night Kids' club, our Bible lesson for the night was "B is for Baptism of Jesus." If you're new to my blog, I mentioned last week that the book I'm using for this program is Bible Stories from A to Z from Teacher Created Materials, Inc. We are enjoying this immensely. The kids are now trying to guess what the next week's lesson is going to be. Last week Schuyler said, "I know what "G" is going to be about--God." :) Well, the letter g isn't going to be for a few weeks yet, and he and sister, Mika, will have to wait to find out.

Here's what we did last night:

Bible story time: The story of Jesus' baptism is found in Luke 3:1-22. I used the Betty Lukens flannel graph set as I told the story. I shared with them the importance of following the Lord in baptism if they know the Lord as their Savior. We sang a couple songs, then I asked them if they knew the verse from last week. They did, so I gave them a little prize for saying it word-perfect! Each week, I have been writing out the new verse as well as the title of the lesson on the white board. You can see below that I like to embellish a bit. I thought the boat was fitting as there are Bible stories of Jesus and his disciples in a boat.

Memory verse time: The verse for this week was Acts 16:31, "Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ and thou shalt be saved." Do you remember the memory verse cube I used in VBS this past summer? I've been using it with Schuyler and Mika these last couple weeks and they love it! After we say the verse a few times and I explain what it means, I let them roll the cube and have them do what it says. This great tool idea comes from Child Evangelism Fellowship. All you do is decorate a cardboard box (I used an empty Kleenex box) with construction paper. On each side, write a way that the child can say the verse. You can use the ideas from the picture below or come up with some on your own. The arrows are used if you're doing it in a large group of children. They stand (or sit) in a circle and someone rolls the cube. Whoever has the arrow pointed to them has to say the verse in the way that the top of the cube says, then gets to roll the cube.

Craft time: I had them do the "B" coloring page first, then we had a special craft. We decorated doves. In the Bible story, a dove came from Heaven after Jesus was baptized.

The directions say to use cardboard to cut out the dove, but I chose to use white foam board. Using some white tissue paper and glue, the kids decorated their doves. They also put on some "feathers." I didn't have any craft feathers, so I painted some leaves white. We punched a hole at the top and put some yarn through. I think they did a great job on these.

Snack time:  In the story, we learned about John the Baptist. He lived in the wilderness and feasted on locusts and honey. Since we didn't like the idea of eating locusts, we chose to eat some pretzel sticks dipped in honey. It was delicious!

Next week:  C is for......can you take a guess?:)