I am so excited to be back and blogging again after taking a little time off over the summer for some projects and commitments. I have been very busy working on a new book that will be released in the coming months, and I have been soaking up some extra time with my kids.
I also helped with a summer missions class for the grade-school kids in our church. It was great fun to help plan activities and crafts for each week…the kids enjoyed it so much and learned a lot! I’ll be sharing more about this over the next couple of weeks.
Each week of the class we picked a different set of things to focus on: each week had a featured country, a past missionary story, a current missionary, a prayer station, and a craft. Small groups of kids rotated through each of these and spent about 10-15 minutes in each area. We also had an opening and closing time with song and prayer.
Here is a link to the song that we used (but we added lots of clapping between lines and some motions, too.) 😊 “Be a Missionary Everyday”
One of the weeks, we focused on Japan. Our missionary from the past was Jake DeShazer. He was a prisoner of war during WWII in Japan, and he hated his captors. After being freed, God helped him to forgive them and called him to return to witness to them. You can read more about him at http://www.jacobdeshazer.com/.
Each of the kiddos received a Japanese flag to keep. You can get one for your home or let your kiddos color one easily by making a circle in the middle of a white piece of paper and letting them color it red.
Our church has a current missionary that is working in the country of Japan that happened to be visiting during the summer months, so we arranged for the mother of this family to come speak to our kids. It was fun to have a real person there that was familiar with Japan. She even brought some dried seaweed for the kids to taste. Each child received a prayer card with this family’s picture on it, so they could take it home and remember meeting the missionary. Hopefully they will pray for them, too.
Our craft was to make koinobori. This is a Japanese flying carp that is frequently made or bought to be displayed around their children’s day in Japan. Many times, there is one for each family member. The dad’s is usually black, and the children have red or many different colors for theirs.
Here is a fun song in Japanese about the koinobori.
You can make one of these at home pretty easily. You will need a toilet paper roll (or paper towel roll cut shorter), some glue sticks, scissors, tissue paper, and string. Sticker eyes are optional (You can draw in your own.)
Use the scissors to cut circles or ovals out of the tissue paper and then cut each one in half. Let the kids join in with the cutting if they are old enough. The half-circles do not have to be perfect. Start gluing the half circles onto your toilet paper roll at the bottom and make sure the rounded part of the paper is facing the bottom. Overlap your pieces as you go, and continue around and up the roll til you reach the top.
Draw some eyes or use stickers. Make a hole on opposite sides of the top, and attach your string. Cut some straight pieces of tissue paper and glue or staple them to the bottom edge of the toilet paper roll.
Now you are ready to display your koinobori!
I’ll post soon about the other weeks and the activities we did…in the meantime, happy crafting! If you want some great information about Japan, check out Operation World’s website!
