Saturday, January 7, 2012

January 2012 - Week 1 - Learn "As a Child of God"

I didn't want to start off the year with another flip chart but I did want to introduce the main new primary song, "As a Child of God," by Janice Kapp Perry. I was pondering different approaches when the Crazy Chorister posted her brilliant idea.

She is definitely one of my favorite singing time resources. It's too easy to spend a bunch of money to enhance singing time activities so I was also looking for an idea where I could rely on things around the house.

This was perfect. I followed her idea to use objects to introduce the song, but have the children choose between the wrong object and right object for each line of the song. I drew names from a jar to have each child come up and help. This is what I used for the "right" objects, except that I see that I left the frowning face that is a "wrong" choice in there.



The children laughed at some of the funny objects. For instance, for the opening line, "I came to earth from Heaven to choose," I had them select whether it was a chart with the word "choose" or if it was a paper airplane representing, "fly," as in "I came to earth from Heaven to fly." For strength, I used the weights and pretended to curl the weight, which amused them.

Just as the Crazy Chorister suggested, we sang each line of the song as we learned it.

Some variations I added to her wonderful suggestions:

I did one verse at a time in junior primary, but showed senior primary ALL of the options, to help make it more complicated for senior primary. I also had senior primary come up and help me hold up the objects to show how quickly they had learned the song once we had figured out all of the correct choices.

I feel like I really had their attention. I will find out next week how well they actually learned the song when I don't have all the objects to hold up for them to remind them about each line ... but I will also make up some other way to help cement the words to the song in their heads.  

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