God's love for us:prayer and craft activity

I've been away for a while moving house but now I am back online!

Here is a colourful activity to help children celebrate God's love for us and for others and to help them think about how this love links us together.

I found a tutorial here for a chain of hearts craft and it made me think of how we could use the idea with children...

Cut out several coloured hearts of the same size.  

 Fold the hearts in half and cut out the middle sections- you can discard these or use them for something else!

 Open out the hearts

 Make a cut, like so, at the side of each heart.

 Link the hearts together by overlapping the cut edges and gluing them (a bit like making a paper chain).

 Attach a piece of ribbon to one of the end hearts and hang on a door knob!

Things to talk about and use for prayer...

• talk about God's love for everyone and how He wants us to show love to others
• Children could write names of people on the hearts who they would like to know God's love 
• Children could write names of family members/ friends on the hearts or choose a different colour to represent each person and pray that they will experience God's love in the coming week
• Children could write on the hearts things that God has made or done that show how much he loves us/ them in particular (especially any answered prayers!)
• the different coloured hearts show that we are all different, but we are all joined together by the fact that God loves us!