A lesson in self control!

Today we continued our look at the fruit of the Spirit in our school lunchtime club by looking at self control...

We tried a game to start that involved marbles and cut up paper towel tubes.  Each child had a long u-shaped piece of tube.  Children stood in team lines and the idea was that they passed a marble from one end of the line to the other using only their piece of tube.  No one was allowed to touch their tube piece to another tube piece until they actually had possession of the marble!  If the marble fell it had to go back to the start of the line again.  We did this as a race between teams and it was hard but fun!

After the game we used it to discuss the fact that they needed to try to keep the marble under control and, if they lost control of the marble, it had consequences for the whole team.  We compared this to keeping control of our emotions, especially anger, because it might hurt or affect us or other people if we didn't.  

We then tried to demonstrate the will power needed to exercise self control.  The children really love it when we use bubbles, but this time we had a bubble machine!  We asked the children what their instinct was when they saw bubbles- unsurprisingly they wanted to pop them!  We challenged them to sit while the bubble machine was on and not to pop any of the bubbles.  This was extremely hard but they tried hard so, eventually, we let them loose on popping!  It was a useful illustration of how hard it can sometimes be to be self controlled.

Next we talked about how it's good to speak to someone when you are wound up and that we often talked to God and asked Him to help us when we were angry or upset.  As a reminder we made self control spinners and showed how, when they were spinning out of control a gentle touch (for us from the Holy Spirit), calms and stops them.