Letting the light in scratch art

As part of our holiday club session on shining like a light, I wanted to help the children to understand in a visual way how Paul and Silas helped bring the prison guard into the light by telling him about Jesus.  I'd been thinking about scratch art, where the darkness is scratched away to reveal the colour underneath and then I found how to make my own scratch art on Pinterest.  Click here to see how!

So... it took a little bit of time, but as we only had about 25 children it wasn't too onerous.  I used oil pastels to make simple pictures of a cross on a coloured background (on credit card size pieces of card).  Wax crayons would work as well.

Next I painted over each picture with a mixture of black paint with a little bit of washing up liquid mixed in.

During the session, we gave each child a blacked out picture and a coin and they rubbed off the paint to reveal a coloured cross underneath.  They didn't know what would be underneath so it was a bit of a surprise!  

This then led to a good discussion about Jesus bringing light to the sadness and hard times of people's lives and how we could help people to see who Jesus was (helping to take the darkness away!)