Time management with children is often about time-stretching strategies. Seasoned teachers know how to get extra miles out of an activity by making up new variations of a song or game.
Any song suited for clapping as you sing is a candidate for creative clapping. We use one of our Scripture songs that tells us to clap: “Clap your hands, all peoples! Shout to God with loud songs of joy!” (Psalm 47:1 ESV) The day we learned the song, we clapped the usual way, but the next Sunday we changed things up. The 30-second song filled two or three minutes, and we added repetitions in a way the children didn’t mind. As a song, the Bible verse becomes:
Clap your hands,
Clap your hands
All peoples!
Shout to God,
Shout to God
With loud songs of joy!
Clap your hands,
Clap your hands
All peoples!
Shout to God,
Shout to God
With loud songs of joy!
I couldn't find a way to upload the MIDI file, but it can be e-mailed if you'd like it. (smommvf@juno.com)
Once we could sing the song with a little confidence, a new way to clap was introduced every three lines. We clapped hands out in front of us and hands behind our backs, hands over our heads, hands to either side, hands clapping in vertical passes (like playing cymbals…correctly!) and hands flat on top of each other, rotating which hand was on top with each clap.
Oh, for video right here! But, you get the idea. Step outside the box of what a clap looks like, and make up some more! We haven’t tried clapping with a partner…yet. Get ready, class!
“I know, my God, that you test the heart and are pleased with integrity.”
1 Chronicles 29:17 NIV
“The integrity of the upright guides them, but the unfaithful are destroyed by their duplicity.”
Proverbs 11:3 NIV
Even young children can begin to understand integrity with the help of our orange friend, the carrot. And a carrot peeler. (Sorry, carrot!)
As you peel a carrot, and then peel some more and some more, all you get is carrot. All the way to the center, clear through to the other side, there’s nothing but carrot! There is no seedy core or spurting seed pod or wood-like pit hidden in a carrot. What you see is what you get, layer after layer.
We are often not so carrot-like. Sometimes our lack of integrity presents a polished version of who we are while hiding very different habits and character traits where we hope they won’t be discovered. Peer pressure can affect the opposite pattern. We behave worse than our true, deeply-held values to gain acceptance or avoid criticism or ridicule.
The Bible is honest about our heart, telling us it is “deceitful above all things
and beyond cure,” adding, “Who can understand it?” (Jeremiah 17:9 NIV) But we are not left hopelessly at the mercy of such a heart. Integrity through and through is possible when the Gospel transforms our terminally deceitful base of operations:
“I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit in you; I will remove from you your heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh.”
Ezekiel 36:26 NIV
Just like the carrot, our intentions and our actions can be faithfully consistent, powered by change gifted to us by the Spirit of God. A lapse of integrity remains possible as long as we are earth-bound, but a life of integrity for a believer includes accessing the forgiveness we claim to embrace and moving forward in the freedom we say Jesus paid for.
