Vacation Bible School

During the week of July 24- 28 I was teaching kindergarteners the truths of the scriptures at North City's VBS. Sounds so easy when you say it like that!!
I, along with Katie Tullsen, volunteered to teacher one of the kindergarten classes for the whole week. We started out with 13 kids and ended with 12, no there was no "accident"... just... behavior troubles... yes, that's it. Our curriculum covered some tough subjects for most 5 year olds but I think we got through to them.
We started out the week talking about God's creation. That's an easy one. We just needed a few pictures of animals and a picture of a man and a woman. Pretty easy to communicate that God spoke and the earth was created.
The next day was a tiny bit more challenging, The Fall. Most kids understand disobedience so it was easy for them to understand why Adam and Eve we cast out of the Garden of Eden.
Wednesday presented a challenge for more than one reason. Middle of the weak exhaustion hit pretty hard and the heat was just plain oppressive (yes I know it's SD but I'm telling the truth here). It took a little creativity and "here are the rules in this classroom" speech but we got off to a better start than we had any other morning. The lesson used the story of Abraham and the covenant God made with him about his descendants to demonstrate God's overall character and covenant relationship with us, His people. The kids took to it pretty well but in the end I think the will remember Karen the Camel (pin the tale on...) and the desert animals in sand.
The last two days were by far the most difficult to teach in my opinion. We taught salvation on Thursday and Glory on Friday. For me the idea of salvation is so complex that I really had a hard time communicating the basic ideas and answering their complex questions with comprehensible answers. My favorite memory was made on Friday. We were talking about heaven and what it would be like. Everyone was pretty good at telling me what would happen in heaven but the ran into trouble when I asked them to draw me a picture. One little guy just did a lot of random color on the page, or so I thought. Turns out the gold represented the streets, the other colors the jewels, and the red blob in the center was Jesus; red because of the blood he shed for us.
By the end of the week I had learned as much if not more than the kids had. It was a wonderful teaching experience and a blessing to see the children grow in the knowledge of Christ and His holy word.