Don't worry: Birds and flowers craft (Matthew 6: 25-34)

This week we reached the stage in the sermon on the mount where Jesus speaks about worry.  There is great imagery in the passage about birds and flowers being given everything they need by God and the children were really able to identify with the simplicity of the ideas.  It led to great discussion about what God provides for us and what we worry about. 

Each child took a stone and glued a heart to it.  This was to remind them that God loves them even more than he loves the birds and the plants.  A stone is also something strong to hold onto, a reflection of the strength and reassurance God can bring in worrying times.  We wanted the children to take the stone home as something they could hold on to when they were worried and that would remind them of God's love and might prompt them to pray.  

I thought it would be a good idea for the children to make a pot to keep the stone in that would remind them of the verses about the birds and flowers, so we challenged the children to transform a little pot into a bird or a flower.  They, of course, had much more creative ideas!

We had a lion, an elephant and a (pink!) rabbit as well as a variety of flowers and a penguin.

It was great to see the children be creative in their response and extend the teaching about birds and flowers to other creatures too!  We created a fair bit of mess, but everyone was engaged and had things to share about their own worries.  The independent creative time gave the leaders the chance to share testimonies from our own lives about when God helped us through worrying times.

When they finished, some of the older children even managed to make up a wordsearch based on the lesson, choosing the words that stood out to them from what they's learned!