Sunday School on Friday – The Shepherd and the Lost Sheep

This week’s Bible story is from a parable that Jesus told, found in Luke, chapter 15.
We read this story from a couple of different children’s Bibles this week – one in the morning, and then the other one for bedtime. I just recently received the second one and I’m hoping to post a review of it within the next few days.
M was feeling a little emotional about this story; the idea of anyone being lost and alone makes him sad. We actually had tears at one point! Toddlers can be rambunctious and drive us nuts, but they also have very tender hearts!
I told him that the shepherd loved the sheep and kept looking for him until he found him, and that Jesus loves us that much too. For some reason this story really seemed to sink in with him.
For a craft we used this idea and made a paper plate sheep. M tore some cotton balls in half (makes it fluffier) and glued them to the back of a paper plate, then added some googley eyes.

At that point, it was looking cute. My artistic skills apparently need some work, because I cut out ears, a nose, and a small mouth and M glued them onto his sheep, and this is what it looks like:

I know! It looks like it has a moustache, doesn’t it?! I can hardly look at the thing. And those ears… well, I’m not sure what sheep ears look like, but I don’t think they look like that! :) Anyway, the fact that it looks funny is totally my fault, and I don’t want it to discourage you from making one with your child. M loves this sheep and was very proud of it.
We also played a very simple “count the sheep” game I made. There are links to the materials I made for this game at the bottom of this post if you are interested in doing this too.
Each person has a game card – basically a blank grid of 20 empty squares. Take turns rolling the die and then put that many lambs on your grid. Going left to right and top to bottom as you place the lambs on helps develop the habit they’ll need later on when they learn to read left to right and top to bottom. Whoever fills their card up first is the winner.
I’ve been really bad lately about getting pictures of M doing these things, but he really enjoyed it and we’ve played it several times since! After we are done playing he likes to sort the lambs into piles by color.
Next week is Noah’s Ark!
Have a beautiful day! :)
Link to make your own dice
Link to game cards
Link to lamb game pieces

Art Time! Bubble Wrap Printing

I’ve been seeing this done on, oh, just about everybody’s blog lately, and we just had to do it!

I gave M a big selection of paint colors – I was trying to get the last little bit of paint out of a lot of his paint bottles, so he had just about every color of the rainbow there.

We started with little bubbles, and painted a section of the paper with a paintbrush, then pressed the bubble wrap into that and then again onto the paper:

You can see in the picture that we made both negative and positive prints. 

Then the big bubbles (I can’t remember where I found this huge bubble wrap, but it came in handy!):

Hey, did you know that if you mix all the colors of the rainbow you get brown?  I know because I trustingly left the room for just a moment and came back to see this:

So much for the bubble wrap.  Apparently trucks are more fun, hee hee. :)  And painting your arms too.  Not that I was doing much laughing at the time…

So, here’s our bubble wrap / truck-in-the-mud finished peice of art:

Have a beautiful day! :)