Flame: Creative Children's Ministry

This play dough mat will work with any of the stories where Jesus performs a healing miracle- Jairus' daughter, the 10 lepers, Bartimaeus... As usual, print out, laminate for repeated use and start creating!   The focus is on Jesus' love shown through his healing power and will hopefully provide opportunities for children to think and pray about people who are ill.  It's also a great opportunity for leaders and children to share their own testimonies of God's healing! Click here to print out the play dough mat.

As part of our lesson on Bartimaeus yesterday, we played I Spy and linked it to saying thank you to God.  As most of the 3-5s are not really up on their letters yet, we used colours instead .e.g 'I spy something that is red'.  When the children had guessed what the item was, we discussed why we needed the item e.g fire extinguishers (red!) were useful for putting out fires so it was a good thing we had them!  We then all said 'Thank you God for Fire extinguishers, amen,' and the next child took a turn.  The children really enjoyed this and you could use the game anywhere and any time to prompt the children to think about the things around them and say thanks to God! To make it even more of a game, you could even give them a tube to look through as an I spy 'telescope'!

Today with our 3-5s, we looked at the story of Bartimaeus and had a lot of fun!   We told the story and everyone had a pair of these glasses made of card and pipecleaners so that we could all practice not being able to see and then being able to!  The glasses were so easy to make and so effective.  The children loved them!  I found the idea on this  Pinterest pin  if you want to see the original idea. After we'd talked about the story we then talked about why we need our eyes.  We put blindfolds on and tried to guess the items in the feely bag! Next we let the children choose an activity. They could draw a picture of Bartimaeus being healed by Jesus (we had lots of smiley faces on Bartimaeus!) or choose from these options: Playing with a selection of goggles, sunglasses and blindfolds Thinking about how Jesus can heals us and playing with the doctor's kit and the toy ambulance Using their eyes to help them put together s...

After hearing the story of Bartimaus, we discussed the fact that Jesus wanted to help us and that, like Bartimaus did, we could reach out and ask him. We asked the children to think of an area in their lives where they felt they needed some help.  They then drew around their hand to symbolise reaching out and, if they wanted to, wrote or drew inside what they wanted Jesus to help them with.  It was actually quite powerful and the children could have spent much longer on it!   Here are some examples: