Sunbeams

Justin and I have gotten a new primary class for the new year and we are now teaching Sunbeams (for those of you not familiar - this means we teach a class of 3 yr olds at church). Our class is small; there are only 4 kids and that is only if they are all there. This past Sunday was our first Sunday with them and we only had 2 kids there.

The thing about teaching Sunbeams is that they are too young to have the lesson last longer than about 10 minutes, but since they are no longer in Nursery we aren't supposed to be having playtime necessarily. Which means that you have to come up with a lot of things to do with them to take up the other 65 minutes of class time. One of the ideas in our manual was to do a short activity with them - they liked it a lot so we did it quite a few times.

You have the kids stand up and you read a cute poem while everyone does some hand motions, basically you talk about there being a place at church for everyone no matter if they are "tall or small". When you say the part of about being tall everyone reaches their hands up high - and when you talk about being small you crouch down to the floor.

The cute part was one of our two kids that were there on Sunday. Anytime we reached up high, he would say "in primary class!" And anytime we crouched down low he would say "in nursery!" So the poem ended up sounding like this (his inserts are in quotes below):
If you're really really tall there's a place at church for you "in primary class".
If you're really really small there's a place at church for you "in nursery".
Tall "primary"
Small "nursery"
Tall "primary"
Small "nursery"
Heavenly Father loves us all.

Also this past Sunday, we had extra time at the end of class. Since we were trying to get to know the kids, we tossed a beanbag and when they caught it they were supposed to tell us something that they liked so we could get to know them. The boy in class started out telling us he liked playing with his toys, but the girl in class is a little shy so if we asked her if she liked playing with her toys she would say yes. We played many rounds of the game and one of the rounds we asked the girl if she liked pizza. After that, anytime we tossed her the beanbag she would say "I like pizza!"

The boy in class was always able to come up with something that he liked on his own, but after a few rounds we could tell he had to really think about what he liked. How could we tell he was having think hard? He would say "I like..." and then he would close his eyes and scrunch up his face before finally saying something like "cake!" It was really cute.

This may be funner than teaching the 6 yr olds.