David cuts Saul's robe (a lesson with 3-5s)

We had a great time yesterday looking at the story from 1 Samuel 24 where David cuts off part of Saul's robe.  We are looking at 'feelings' at the moment and used this story in the context of choosing not to get angry but asking God to help you do the right thing.

To establish the idea of 'choosing' (David CHOSE not to kill Saul) we played a game.  I put 5 red balls and 1 blue ball in a bag.  Children closed their eyes, put their hand in the bag and chose a ball.  The person who chose the blue ball won.  For some reason they wanted to play this again and again!

Next we acted out the story by hiding and creeping up on the 'king' and I cut off a piece of the cloak our 'king' was wearing.  We talked about how David might have been angry at Saul for trying to kill him, but he chose to not hurt anyone.  We then discussed how we feel when we are angry and how we can ask God to help us.  I showed the children some reflection bottles (bottles containing water and glitter) and they took it in turns to shake the bottles and watch the glitter settle and we prayed that God would help us to calm down when we felt angry.  They were fascinated and I had to quickly make up another bottle for them to use during our play activities!

Our craft was paper tearing and sticking to represent the piece of robe that David cut off.  They spent ages on this!

Then we had some free play around the themes of the story...

• playing with the reflection bottles
• continuing with the paper tearing activity
• Playing with capes and crowns

•  hiding in the 'cave' we made from draping a play tent in fabric

The children especially loved the last two activities and kept taking it in turns to hide in the cave, creep out and mime cutting the robe of a resting 'king'.  The grown ups had to be constantly surprised kings!

As a take home activity, each child took away a copy of the story cube.  Print off a copy here.