Samuel Helps at the Tabernacle

Howdy Friends! 

It has been another great week at childcare! If you know anything about our class you know that we LOVE to cook. And today we got to make butter! More on that later... 

Our lesson today was about Samuel helping at the Tabernacle from 1 Samuel 1:28; 2:11, 18-21, 26. We learned that Samuel began serving God at a young ange by doing practical tasks for Eli. We talked in class about how we can be helpful to mom and dad at home by helping to do chores like clean up our room and make our bed. 

For our craft today we practiced helping out around the "house" by making butter. We also talked about how important washing is - including washing our hands! We glued our handwashing song onto a piece of paper with soap and washcloths. We also practiced cleaning by scrubbing some of our toys!We also played a clean-up game with our toys after we played today! 

Making the Butter: 
Making butter is so easy! All you need is heavy whipping cream and jar with a lid. Pour the whipping cream in the mason jar (TIP: It helps if the jar is cold). And shake for about 30 minutes until the separates into the "butter" and the "buttermilk" (YES! It's real buttermilk!)  We had the children help with this by shaking the jar for us! We enjoyed eating the butter with our cracker snack! 

Craft: 
We wrote our clean-up song on a piece of paper and had the students glue the paper along with a cloth that represented a "wash cloth" and a piece of felt paper with "SOAP" on it to the paper. 

Cleaning Games: 
We had our students help us "clean up" the room and wash the high chair to pretend like they were Samuel helping Eli! 

Hannah's Prayer

Hiya Friends! 

We had another great Wednesday childcare class today! 

In our lesson we read a Bible teaching from 1 Samuel 1; 2:18-19. We learned about how Hannah prayed to God for a son and God answered her prayer. God saw Hannah's desire in her heart to have a baby and Hannah promised God to give her son back to him. So Hannah brought Samuel to the tabernacle to learn to be God's helper. 

To help incorporate our craft into today's lesson we packed suitcases for a trip like Samuel may have packed to go on his trip to the tabernacle. 

For this craft we used one piece of brown construction paper, two chenille stems, stickers, and die-cuts of clothes. 

First take the brown construction paper and fold it in half and use a hole puncher to poke two holes at the top of the suitcase. 

Add handles to the suitcase by poking the chenille wire through the whole on one side and wrapping the end of it around itself then do the same thing with the other side of the stem so that it creates a handle. Do this for both sides of the construction paper. This can be done by the teacher or the student can help thread the stem through the hole while the teacher guides him. In our case, due to time restrictions, we threaded the stem through the hole for our students. 

Allow the students to decorate the outside of their suitcase. In our case we used travel themed stickers to decorate our suitcase. 

Inside the suitcase, the students glued the pictures of the die-cut clothes and we wrote a verse at the top to remind them of what we learned today. 

We hope your children had fun with us this week and were able to tell you about Samuel traveling to the tabernacle to be God's helper. 

Get ready to roll up your sleeves next week as we talk about how Samuel was God's helper at the tabernacle! 

See you next Wednesday! 

~Mrs. Blueberry & Mrs. Cherry~

Moses and a Path Through the Sea

Hi Y'all! Mrs. Cherry Again! 

Today our lesson was from Exodus 14-15:20. We learned about how God was with His people as they escaped from Egypt. He showed them that he was all-powerful by pushing the waters apart to let his people escape from the advancing army! 

We started off today with a fun game to talk about how God helped the Israelite's get through trouble by parting the Red Sea so they could pass through when the Egyptians were pursuing them. We strung blue streamers from a piece of construction paper and talked to them about how we were going to get through the BIG BLUE SEA. Would we go around it? Would we swim on top of it? Could we go through it? Yes! God can part the sea for us so we can go through it safely! Then we took turns going through the sea just like the Israelite's. 

This is one of my absolute favorite crafts to do with the our students! We made our own little aquarium to represent the Sea that the Israelites walked through. 

Our aquarium is made from a few ingredients. For this craft you will need: 
Ziplock Bag (one for each student) 
Blue Hair Gel (found at the Dollar Store) 
Water
Die cut Foam Fishes
Glitter (teacher handles this for little eyes) 

Children put the foam fishes into the bag:

Place about 1 Tbsp of Glitter into a dixie cup and allow the children to pour into the bag as well: 

Now use the same dixie cup and fill with water and allow children to pour the water into the bag. Child and teacher work together to squeeze a generous amount of blue hair gel into the bag. 

Mix together and you have your own little mini aquarium for the children to take home and enjoy! 

Moses and the Escape from Egypt

Hi Y'all! Mrs. Cherry here again! 

One thing you will learn about Mrs. Blueberry and I is that we love to cook in our classroom. We have lots of fun with cooking and eating and learning! 

Today was our second class! We learned in Exodus 12:31-38;13:20-22 about how God did amazing miracles to rescue his people from a life of slavery. He was a loving and caring God by leading them using a cloud by day and a pillar of fire by night to keep them safe. He fed them and never left them alone even when they were afraid. And just like God did for his people, He promises to be with us wherever we go! 

For our craft today we decided to take our typical "Banana Hedgehog" recipe, tweak it, and turn it in a flame like in our story with Moses today. 

The Banana Hedgehog recipe is typically done with a banana, chex mix, and m&m's. We used fruit loops and ommited the m&m's to create our flame. 

First we cut banana's into quarters and picked out only the red, yellow, and orange fruit loops and placed them in a Ziplock bag: 

Then came the fun part from the kids - HAMMER TIME! We borrowed some hammers from our Childcare resource room tool kit and let the kids take turns pounding away at the fruit loops to crush them up. 

After that, we put the banana's into the bag and mixed them together. Out came beautiful and delicious "flames" that we could eat together! 

Baby Moses in a Basket

Hi Y'all! Mrs. Cherry here. Welcome to our fruit basket blog.  

Today we had our very first class at Johnson Ferry Baptist Church Childcare ministry. We wanted to make our classroom very fun, warm and inviting to our brand new friends. All of our lessons come from Gospel Light Preschool Curriculum.

Our story this evening was about Moses' first appearance in the Bible from Exodus 1:18-2:10. This is the story of when Pharoh ordered all Hebrew baby boys thrown into the Nile. Moses' parents put him in a waterproof basket and trusted God. God honored their faith by protecting Moses. Moses' sister followed him down the river because she wanted to see what would happen to him. Pharoh's daughter found the basket with Baby Moses and decided to save his life and gave him to Moses' sister and Moses' mother nursed him and gave him to Pharoh's daughter and he became her son and she named him Moses. 

In order to make our classroom super fun and exciting we decided to create an underwater adventure using chairs, streamers, and die-cut fish! 

What was so amazing about these two little girls playing in our underwater adventure is that one of our little friends does not speak English very well. However, they played together like they understood everything one another was saying. They had a blast going through the the underwater adventure over and over again. The giggles were contagious. 

For our craft we made play-dough. Our recipe is super simple: 

1 cup Flour

1/2 cup salt

2 teaspoons cream of tartar

Mix Dry Ingredients

1 cup water

1 Tbsp oil

Liquid food coloring

Mix wet and dry ingredients to remove lumps

The length of time it cooks determines how pliant it is. Cook until just not wet, makes it a good pliancy for preschoolers. Cook longer to make firmer. Knead and Play! 

If you have a longer class period time with your friends you can make it together. However, we only have an hour for our story, games, and craft so we had to make ours in advance. We had our students make little baskets out of their play dough. 

What a successful first week of class!