"Primary Colors" and more.....

Today, we learned "Primary Colors". I saw an idea somewhere on the internet (sorry-i can't remember where...) and it led me to make these...

Simple, but they worked great. I had 3 children hold the circles with the numbers facing outward, then turn them around when it was time. It was fun to learn a song from the "olden days". We also sang "This is God's House", "Dare to do Right", "Give, Said the Little Stream" and "Called to Serve".

They didn't do very well on "Called to Serve" because they were too busy being silly so i took a minute to tell them about the song and asked the teachers about singing that song on their missions and how they felt about it. Then, I put my husband on the spot and asked him to come up and sing "Called to Serve" in German while we sang it in English. The kids were so enthralled, they all stopped singing about halfway through just to hear him sing it in German. It was fun and i'm so grateful for my sweet husband who was a good sport, although now i think I'm in his debt.... :)

I also made flipcharts on Word for "This is God's House" and "Dare to do Right", but i don't know how to upload them to this site. Any tips??

Face Off! (a.k.a. Red Rover)

This is one of those simple ideas that comes while trying to sleep at night. I was grateful for the idea, but sleep would be nice too. :) This can be used to review old songs or teach a new song.

Have the teachers come stand in a line at the front of the primary, facing the children. Have them sing either one line or the whole song. The primary children then sing the same thing. Have the pianist, secretary, or other adult be the "judge". Whichever group sings the best gets to pick one person from the other team to come join "their side". (however, there's obviously no running-the chosen person is automatically on the team when they are chosen). You can make it more challenging by saying, "you can bring someone with you to the new team if you tell me what the last line in the song is, or tell me what comes after __, etc." I"m sure there are a billion ways to use this game.

The purpose is to have fun while singing any given song as many times as possible while learning the words and tune.

I Kneel to Pray

I want to teach the song, "I Pray in Faith" to Junior primary (senior already knows it). I found this idea here, which i liked. I'm just going to include a poster as a visual for my young ones. I'm going to have them "make the poster" as they build the song. I wrote the first word of each line on the poster as seen above.I'm going to tell them that i didn't have time to glue on my pictures so i need their help. The 8 clipart pictures will be jumbled up on the chalkboard for them to choose from as we learn/build each phrase.

I'm going to ask these questions for each phrase:

*What position are we in when we pray?" KNEEL

*how often do we pray? EVERYDAY

*who do you talk to when you pray? HEAVENLY FATHER

*Why do we pray? HE HEARS AND ANSWERS ME

*How do we know this is true? FAITH

As they guess the right answers for each line, i will sing it several times while a few children choose the correct pictures to put on my poster. Then we'll all sing that line together. We'll continue until all 4 lines are complete and our poster will look like this:

*I feel like i need to explain a couple of my pictures: I couldn't think of anything for "answers" so my 14 year old son suggested i use 2+2=4. It may be too abstract for the little ones but it's the best i (he) could come up with. My FAITH is in a shield because when i taught the 2nd verse of scripture power i did it this way and i like to be consistent with words that are in different songs. Hopefully the rest are self explanatory-happy singing!