Your CCD lessons fill your class time, but can you get you students to take what they've learned home with them?
The best religion lessons address your students' everyday lives. Help them to remember what you've taught by giving them reminders for long after class is over.
When coming up with craft ideas, try to think of things that they’ll see in their everyday lives during the week: picture frames, doorknob hangers, trinket boxes and other containers for their dressers.
Reward your students for thinking of your CCD class when they’re away. Announce to the class that they can win a candy bar for every time they share with the class a Bible verse that they’ve seen in public. They’ll be on the lookout for bumper stickers, signs and advertisements with Bible verse passages.
Make Power Bracelets
A simple beaded bracelet is a fun craft for kids of all ages. First-graders can simply thread beads onto a string. Older children can use more difficult bracelet-making techniques.
Make power bracelets as a class and send home a slip of paper signifying what each color means.
Clear bead – represents life
Black bead – represents sin
Red bead – represents the blood of Jesus
Blue bead – represents the waters of baptism
White bead – represents purity of a life following the laws of Christ
Green bead – represents Christian growth
Gold bead – represents heaven.
Find Bible verses that explain each concept and include them in your take-home sheet.
Send Home a Prayer Rock
To remind your students to say their morning and evening prayers, send home a prayer rock with a poem instructing them to put the rock on their pillows.
Print the poem on paper in a narrow column, about 2 inches wide, and mount it on a backing of white contact paper. Trim with zigzag scissors and punch a hole in the top.
Gather up rocks, one for each of your students, each about the size of a lime. Wrap each rock in a square of brightly colored fabric that’s been cut with pinking shears. Wrap up the rock in the fabric and tie it like a knapsack with a piece of ribbon.
Thread the ribbon through the hole in the poem and pass them out to your students.
Prayer Rock
I’m your little prayer rock
And this is what I’ll do –
Just put me on your pillow
Until the day is through.
Then turn back the covers
And climb into your bed
And WHACK! your little prayer rock
Will hit you on the head!
Then you will remember
As the day is through
To kneel and say your prayers
As you wanted to.
Then when you are finished
Just dump me on the floor.
I’ll stay there through the nighttime
To give you help once more.
When you get up the next morning
CLUNK! I stub your toe
So you will remember
Morning prayers before you go.
Put me back upon your pillow
When your bed is made
And your clever little prayer rock
Will continue in your aid.
Because your heavenly Father
Cares and loves you so
He wants you to remember
To talk to him, you know!
Pocket Reminders
Make pocket reminders, a small wooden token or a small flat rock they can keep in their pocket to remind them of something from your lessons.
Small wooden flat discs can be purchased by the bag at a craft store. Have the students draw with permanent marker on the rock or disc a symbol of something they want to remember. Perhaps each of your students can come up with a trait they’d like to improve, a virtue – being kinder to others, helping around the house, praying more often. Think of a picture, a word or a symbol that will serve as a reminder and draw it on the disc. Tell your students to put the reminder in their pocket every day.
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