Sunday School - Proverbs (8) hard work

"Go to the ant, you sluggard; consider its ways and be wise!" (Prov 6:6)

Proverbs has a lot to say about hard work. But for me, this Sunday School lesson was a day of rest.

A group of students from my husband's uni group were running their annual mission at our church, and one of their responsibilities was to lead Sunday School. So I sat and did jigsaws with my 2 year old in creche, and watched as Shell and 2 other students taught the class with great energy and enthusiasm. Here they are leading our little group:


They started with a drama, with Shell the mum giving her 2 boys their jobs for the day, then Shell the teacher handing out homework tasks. Of course, one of the boys did their jobs well, and the other was lazy and negligent, and they suffered the necessary consequences (I didn't quite overhear these).

Then it was on to the lesson, and Shell came up with a brilliant variation on the charts we've been making each week. She drew an ant hill on a large sheet of white paper (being an artist helps!) and they played a game she invented called "up the hill". The kids were given a pile of Proverbs verses about work and gluttony (we attempted 2 interrelated topics this week) and a number of small pictures of ants.

Up one side of the hill went the verses about hard work with an up-going ant (6:6-8, 27:18). Down the other side of the hill went the verses about slothfulness with a down-going ant (20:4; 22:13; 24:30-34). On the middle of the hill were pasted those many 2-way verses in Proverbs, contrasting the results of hard work and laziness, with an up- and down-going ant (10:4-5; 14:23; 23:19-21). Here's Ben and Lizzy with the poster they made:


For the craft, Shell printed out a picture of an ant in the middle of an A4 sheet of paper. She asked the kids to write or draw tasks they wanted to work hard at around the ant. Here's a finished drawing (it looks like Shell might have drawn this one!):

I was very amused to see that Ben came up with 3 tasks of vital importance: finish a catapult he's making with friends for a school project, get something called a "skin" on some computer game he's playing, and become a Pokemon master on his Pokemon Diamond game. I'm not sure that's exactly what Shell meant, but it's a very endearing indication of his ongoing preoccupations!