Sunday's 10 minute Children's Church Lesson.

I only had 10 minutes left before service was over.  There goes my plans for the morning.  I had a lesson with coordinating craft, snack and game planned, but plans changed.  We spent some time performing our VBS songs for the church, then watching a slideshow from the fun-filled week.  Now we only had 10 minutes to fit in a lesson and make it something worth coming back to.  I had an idea.  Got out the Parachute and chose a story. NOAH's ARK!  I had each of my 11 kids that morning grab a handle of our parachute.  And gave them these simple instructions:

• When I say the word 'boat', you raise the parachute as high as you can. 
• When I say the word 'Flood', you flap the parachute as fast as you can.
• When I say the word 'Rainbow', we're all going to walk in a big circle with the parachute
• When I say the word 'Noah', lower the parachute as low as you can

Then we gave it a little practice run."NOAH" "FLOOD" "RAINBOW" "BOAT" And threw in a beach ball just for fun!

Stock picture from VBS (front left is Serenity (my 3 y/o daughter) & in the gray shirt on the right, is Obadiah (my 5 y/o son)

I began... "NOAH (down down) heard from God. God told him that there was going to be a great FLOOD (ruffle ruffle) and that he wanted NOAH (Down down down) to build a very big BOAT (Up up and away)".... you get the idea.  I went through the whole story, making sure to use our key words as often as possible.  The kids LOVED it, and it insured that they were paying attention to what I was saying.  Once Noah got the animals all on board, we all boarded the 'Boat' too.

Then the story continued.  I wish I had gotten video of it, but I didn't this time. This was a definite WIN, and I will be using our parachute to tell more stories in the future!

Once our story was over, we even had a couple minutes to play a 2 by 2 animal game with the parachute.  I assigned them each an animal (By pairs, of course) and as I called on their animal, they crawled, hopped, slithered, or walked underneath the parachute to where the other 'animal' of their kind had come from. Swapping spots with them. 

Another stock photo from VBS.  The beauty in the striped shirt is my daughter, Theorie (10)

This is my 2 year old, River.

This story and game, worked with my vastly varying group of children on Sunday morning (ages 2-12) They all came away from it excited to spread the word of GOD to their family and friends as they left my classroom for the week ahead.  I will make disciples of them yet! :o)