Today we looked again at a meal that Jesus shared with others. The children hear the story of the last supper at least once a year when we look at the Easter story, but conversation with the younger ones reveals that they don't always connect the communion service with this story, so we probably can't tell it often enough!
Today we focussed on the theme of 'remembering', thinking about how Jesus used the meal as a way of asking his disciples to remember him.
We started off with a memory game. We put some items on a tray and asked the children to look and remember what was there. In secret we then removed an item and asked them to guess what was missing. Smaller items were much harder to remember!
Today we focussed on the theme of 'remembering', thinking about how Jesus used the meal as a way of asking his disciples to remember him.
We started off with a memory game. We put some items on a tray and asked the children to look and remember what was there. In secret we then removed an item and asked them to guess what was missing. Smaller items were much harder to remember!
We then asked the children about really good things they could remember from their lives. They drew or wrote their favourite memories on pieces of paper and then we put them all inside the treasure chest to symbolise how precious they were to us. We then all put our hands on top of the chest and said thank you to God for all the great memories we had and asked Him to give us many more!
Finally we talked about the last supper and acted out the breaking of bread and drinking of wine with biscuits and blackcurrant squash. We talked about why we remembered Jesus and what he had done for us and this actually provoked some very interesting questions about the crucifixion and the symbolism of the earthquake and the tearing of the curtain when Jesus died!
After this we made our own remembrance of Jesus' special meal. We got some bread dough (one of the bake your own loaves found in the chiller section of the supermarket), broke it into pieces so that the children could form their own bread roll and then took them back to church to bake for the last 10 minutes of the service.
The children were thrilled to eat the hot bread and the adults, who had been listening to a sermon about the last supper, were very tempted by the smells from the kitchen and jealous that there was no bread for them!
This is fantastic! I will be using parts of this lesson at Children's Church on sunday. Thanks!
ReplyDeleteGlad it's useful :-) hope it goes well!
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