Prayer - We can say Thank You

 Hello and welcome back to  Christchurch Kids. We hope you’ve had a great week. Happy Fathers Day!

We have been asking lots of questions about prayer recently. Have you prayed this week? What did you chat to God about? 

We’ve been looking at the different sorts of things we can talk to God about when we pray and today we are looking at...

Thank you prayers

There are lots of examples of people saying thank you to God in the Bible and sometimes they happen at the most unexpected and surprising of times! 

Do you know the story of Jonah? Let’s have a watch now so we are reminded of the story.

Jonah prayed his thank you prayer inside the great big fish! What do you think he thanked God for as he was sat inside a big, smelly fish!? Jonah thanked God that He had sent the fish to save him from the stormy sea.

Do you know the story of Daniel and the Lions’ Den? Daniel was living in a place where prayer had been banned but he still got up and prayed to God and thanked him even though it meant he didn’t just get in trouble he got thrown into a pit full of lions. Wow!

What about when Jesus took the five loaves and two fishes and fed 5,000 people? It was a miracle but the interesting, surprising thing for us is that Jesus said his thank you prayer BEFORE he shared out the food.

The Bible is full of surprising stories of thank you prayers. It shows us that we can say thank you to God anywhere, anytime and for anything.

What would you like to say THANK YOU to God for today?

In case you're wondering what to say thank you for, here's a silly song to remind us that God made everything! Can you sing along??

Activity

Today we are going to make Lego models of things we are thankful to God for. Maybe you can put it on a shelf this week and when you see your model you could think of something to say thank you for. Maybe you could make a model of your Dad or your Grandpa as we are feeling especially thankful for Fathers today.

Prayer

We’ve got a fun way to pray today. Do you know how to play the Alphabet game? It’s a great game to play in the car. You choose a category and you have to think of something for every letter of the alphabet. We usually try animals or boys/girls names or countries.

Today we are going to play the alphabet game but this time we are going to think of things we can say thank you to God for. We can say ...

“Thank you God for...” and add a word starting with the next letter of the alphabet. 

Maybe today we are going to extra thankful for xylophones, yoghurts and zebras! 

We've got a great song to sing to God today all about saying Thank You. The actions are fun to join in with as well. 

We hope you have a good week and find lots of things to say thank you to God for. We'll be back here next week asking more questions about prayer but you can also join us in church on Sunday mornings for our group for primary school aged children. We will be playing games, telling stories, making crafts and of course, trying out the things we have learnt about prayer. 

If you would like to join us on Sunday mornings in church, please book your place here.

The Walls of Jericho

 Hello Christchurch Kids and welcome to our blog. This Sunday is our last look at the exodus of the Israelites. They escaped slavery in Egypt and have spent years in the desert. The land God promised them is nearly in sight.

First there is a river to cross... but we've already seen that water doesn't get in the way of God's plans.

The Israelites have crossed the river and so now the only thing in their way is a wall but it's not just any wall. This was the wall surrounding Jericho.

Wow! What an amazing story. How do you think the Israelites felt when Joshua told them the plan to take the city of Jericho? Do you think they wondered how God was going to make it work? They had seen God do incredible things  already so maybe they didn't doubt it. 

God can do amazing things when we listen to him and follow his ways. Sometimes God's way might seem strange to those around us but this is what the Bible tells us about God...

Yes, God’s riches are very great! God’s wisdom and knowledge have no end! No one can explain the things God decides. No one can understand God’s ways.

Romans 11:33

We are going to have some fun building and knocking things down today as we remember the story of the walls of Jericho.

Our challenge today is to see how tall a tower you can make with Lego BUT you have to stack the bricks on the smooth sides not using the bumps! How high can you build your tower before it falls over?

or  you could play a game of Jenga - another great game of building and knocking down.

Prayer

Father, You are the God who can do anything. You can even make shouting at a wall work to bring it down. Help us believe in You and follow Your instructions even when it seems weird to other people.

Amen

Here's one of favourite songs from F@CT and we can sing it today as we have heard that God is bigger than big, stronger than strong and mightier than mighty. God can do anything!

Thanks for joining us today and we hope you have enjoyed following the adventures of  Moses, Joshua and the Israelites. Next week we begin our journey towards Easter, starting at Palm Sunday.

March F@CT

 

Hi everyone and welcome to F@CT Online. We are so glad that you can join us here as we have fun together learning more about God. 

We love to sing and dance at F@CT so let's start with one of our favourite songs. You can join in with the actions and singing as we praise God. We can always trust Him to lead us through troubled times as He is our Lighthouse. 

We've got a special visitor to F@CT today and she is called Barbara. She hasn't been to F@CT before but she has heard lots of good things about it. She spoke to Emy over Zoom to find out more.

Thanks Barbara and Emy. That helped us understand a bit more about Lent. 

(Emy would like to point out that she only gave up television for Lent and that she does still watch it. She particularly enjoys watching The Deep on CBBC.)

Lent is a time when God is inviting us to get closer to him. When you hear about people giving something up for Lent or trying something new, that is the reason. Sometimes there might be things that are getting in the way of getting closer to God.

 

We have a story to watch together about someone who was excited to hear about Jesus coming to visit and Jesus invited him to come and meet with him. The surprising thing about this story is the person who Jesus was inviting. He had lots of things in his life which could have stopped him getting close to God. His name was Zacchaeus.

What a great story and it's a fantastic story to hear in Lent. Jesus is inviting EVERYONE to come and meet with him at Easter and to hear the good news of Easter day. He knows when we get things wrong but he loves us anyway and he wants us to say sorry so nothing will get in the way of our relationship with our amazing Father God. 

Activity

We love getting creative at F@CT to help us remember a story so today we are going to be making climbing characters, just like Zacchaeus climbing a tree in today's story.

You can find out how to make your own climbing character here. Maybe you can make a Zacchaeus to climb or maybe you could draw yourself and imagine you were there, climbing the tree to try to see Jesus.

Prayer

Today we are going to have a go at making our own prayer station. A prayer station is an activity or a collection of objects that help us to think about our prayers. 

We can make a Lego prayer station. This a great idea from the Flame:Creative blog. If you don't have little Lego, you could use Duplo or Playmobil or you could draw a prayer station.

Start by making a cross shape on the base to help us remember we are bringing our prayers to Jesus.

Now you can use your Lego to pray. You could use different colour bricks to represent different things you would like to pray for. You could build bricks together to represent a family or a group.  You can use figures and accessories too, such as trees and flowers for prayers for the environment.

When you have assembled your prayer station, take some time to be still and talk to God about the things you have on the board.

We've heard how awesome God is and so we're going to praise God together again with this brilliant song. Here are some cheeky pandas to help us sing it...

Thanks for joining us to celebrate F@CT together today. We hope you have a great week and at Christchurch we are praying for all of  you who are going back to school (or continuing going to school but with lots more friends). 

Please pop back next week as we continue to follow the adventures of the Israelites as they make their way towards the Promised Land. 

The Tent of Meeting

 Hello everyone and welcome back to Christchurch Kids. We hope you've had a great half term week.

We're following the Israelites at the moment as Moses leads them across the desert to the land God has promised them. 

Today we are going to be looking at a very special place called "the Tent of Meeting". Let's watch the video together and find out more about it.

In the video, the Tent of Meeting looks like a very simple tent but it definitely wasn't. God gave Moses very detailed instructions on how to build and decorate the Tent of Meeting. In fact, the instructions are so detailed that they can be found in Exodus in chapters 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30 and 31!

God gave instructions for how to build a special table and what a golden lampstand should look like. He gave instructions for 10 linen curtains woven with blue, purple and red threads with pictures of cherubim ( a type of angel). And lots, lots more.

Why was the Tent of Meeting so special? What can we learn about God as we hear about the Israelites building it? 

The Tent of Meeting was so special because God is so special. We use the word "holy" to describe God and it means completely perfect in goodness and righteousness.

We can never make a building as special and perfect as God but the Tent of Meeting took many precious materials and people devoted their time and effort to show how they considered God to be completely holy and worthy of worship.

There is no one holy like the Lord.
    There is no God but you.
    There is no Rock like our God.

1 Samuel 2:2

Activity

You may have noticed that we don't have pages in our Moses Activity Books for today's story.

I thought it would be fun to make our own tents today (or dens).

What things are precious to you that you would use to decorate your tent to show God how special He is to you? 

Here's a den we made in our house a little while ago. We have used favourite blankets and quilts and there were lots of cushions inside to make it really cosy! Maybe a favourite, precious toy could visit your tent?

Prayer

We've got a prayer today that we can say on our own but it is even better when we pray this prayer with other people. Maybe you would like to pray this with people in your family.

God is so good and so amazing that there are endless things we can thank God for.

You can take it in turns to say...

"God is good, God is great,

Thank you God for ________________"

See how long you can keep your praise prayers going by thinking of different things to add to the end of the last line.

We have a great song today called "Tabernacle". This word means "Tent of Meeting".

Let's see how the people worked together to make this special place for God.

We hope you've had fun building dens today. If you would like to send in pictures of your dens,, we would love to share them on here. You can email Emy at childrenandfamilies@christchurch-clevedon.org.uk

February F@CT

 

Hello and welcome to F@CT Online! It's great that you've been able to join us today as we have fun together and learn about God.

At F@CT we love to praise God together with singing, actions and dancing. We hope this song gets you up and moving as we praise God together.

At church over the past few weeks, we have been learning all about generosity.

Our story today is about when Jesus showed amazing generosity. His friends and followers were feeling really hungry and he gave them not just enough to eat but enough that everyone was full up and there were leftovers. 

This story starts with a little boy who was generous enough to share his packed lunch with Jesus. Although, I do wonder how much he wanted to eat his packed lunch ("Oh mum - not bread and fish again!") as he still had it left at teatime!

Let's watch this Lego video and find out more...

Wow! Jesus is amazing! He was so generous when he fed all those people. 

When we follow God we follow Jesus' example of how to live so...

How can we be more generous?

Lizzie has been puzzling over this question and she decided to give Supergranny a call to ask for some help. 

Activities

We can have lots of fun as we remember the story of when Jesus was so generous feeding all those people with only 5 loaves and 2 fish.

Here's a Chat Mat you can print and colour.

You can download it here

A Flapping Fish game

You can make your own racing game with fish cut out from newspaper and a book or a magazine to flap them along. Maybe you can race them with someone else in your family. Maybe you can make a track around the room and time to see how long it takes for you to move your fish along.

We had fun practising this one...

Prayer

Let's take a moment to be still and quiet to talk to God.

Supergranny told us all about the Fruit of the Spirit and how we can be more generous but it isn't always easy. Have a look at our Fruit of the Spirit picture. Is there one that you need to ask God to help you with this week?

Dear God

Thank you that you are so generous to us. You give us so many good things and love us so much.

Sorry when we aren't generous, when we put ourselves first.

Help us to remember your generosity and to be more generous with how we love others.

Amen

You could colour this in and put it up in your house to remind you about how we can be generous to others.

You can download this picture here.

We have this brilliant song to help us remember the different Fruits of the Spirit. 

We hope you have fun joining in.

Thank you for joining us for F@CT Online this week and we hope you have a great week.

 We will be back next week continuing our adventures following the incredible story of Moses.

October F@CT

 

Hi everyone and welcome to F@CT Online! We are really excited today as we are not only having F@CT online but we are also having F@CT in church as well. We are feeling really thankful that we are able to meet together in different ways, still able to have fun and learn about God wherever we are.

As we are thinking about being thankful, that is today's theme as it is a time in the church called Harvest when we are thankful for all the things that God has given us.

Our Bible verse today comes from Psalm 107 verse 1

Thank the Lord because He is good.

His love continues forever.

What would our day look like if we were really thankful for all the amazing things we have? 

Maybe it would look a bit like this...

When we are in church, we aren't allowed to sing at the moment but we are going to joining in with the actions to this song together. If you are at home, you can join in with the actions too and sing as loud as you like! 

Let's praise God together.

Maybe you would like to make a Lego model of something that you are thankful for today?

Prayer

We are going to be making Thank You prayer posters today.  

Who do you think made this prayer poster? It's someone who loves wearing colourful, stripey socks, has a large family and loves energetic sports likes skateboarding and football.

That's right! This is Supergranny's prayer poster. She is feeling thankful for her family, her favourite sports, her holiday to the beach, her favourite socks, Froggy Bear and her Bible, which helps her learn more about God.

You can cut pictures out from magazines or newspapers, draw your own pictures, or write words to make your prayer poster. You can put it up in your house and add things to it every day. 

Let's finish today with one of our favourite songs. I find this one quite tricky to sing and do the actions at the same time, even when I have friends like these to help me remember which action comes next!

Let's join in and have fun remembering how AMAZING God is!

At Harvest, one of the ways we can thank God for the fantastic things He has given us is by sharing with others. Here are a couple of ways we can share with others at church at the moment.

Make Lunch

The Make Lunch team has been helping families in our town this year when lots of people have found it difficult to have enough food. This has been a fantastic way to show people that God cares about them. We can help Make Lunch by bringing in the items that they need to help others. This year, we have been asked if we can bring in these items...

Pasta

Pasta sauces

Nappies (size 3, 4 or 5)

Wet wipes

Toilet rolls

Tins of rice pudding

Ready Made Custard

Bottles of Squash

Tinned Vegetables

There will be a table in the foyer next to the office door in church for your donations. Please bring them as soon as possible.

Love in a box

We already getting excited about Christmas this year and we are going to be collecting filled shoeboxes again. You can download the form with all the information about what to put in the shoeboxes here.

Christmas may seem a little while away but shoeboxes are sent out at the beginning of November.

We hope you've had great fun today feeling thankful. We will be back here on the blog next week finding out about more adventures with The Story Keepers.

                

September Fact

Hi everyone and welcome to F@CT Online. We can't meet together yet for our F@CT service so we thought we would bring it to you in your own home. We've got some familiar faces and favourite songs. We'll have craft ideas to help us explore some fantastic Bible stories and prayer suggestions for you to try at home.

Today, Emy spoke to Lizzie online. Maybe you've been speaking to friends and family like this too. 

Let's see how they got on...

Here's one of our favourites. You can join in with the actions and sing along.

Here's our Bible story for today. Look at all the changes that Moses faced in his life. God was with him every step of the way.

(If you want to know more about Moses, you can read all about him in your Bible. There is also a fantastic film about Moses called The Prince of Egypt. It's currently available to watch on Amazon Prime.)

Here's our new song. You can sing along with the words and maybe you can make up your own actions. 

Make your own Lighthouse

" My Lighthouse" is great song to sing with really fun actions. It is also a fantastic picture to help us think about God. The lighthouse never moves and it is always there to help anyone out at sea. It's there when the seas are calm and it's there when a huge storm is raging. It is a steady light to help people stay safe.

Just like the lighthouse, God is always there whatever is going on around us. We can always trust Him that he will show us the way. In Psalm 119 the Bible says...

Your word is a lamp to my feet 

and a light to my path.

You can have a go at making your own lighthouse to remind you that God is with you every day.

You could have a go at making a model. 

(These children have used battery operated tealights so their lighthouses re really safe.)

You could draw a picture.

You could even make a lighthouse from Lego.

If you do make a lighthouse we would really love to see pictures of what you have made. It would be great to share the pictures on here. 

You can email your pictures to Emy at 

sundaychildrenandfamiliescoordiantor@christchurch-clevedon.org.uk

Prayer

We can talk to God about anything at anytime. Sometimes it helps us to have a suggestion for what we want to talk to God about. Today we are going to use some dice. You probably have a dice tucked away in a game somewhere.

We can use the numbers we roll on the dice to give us a suggestion for what we would like to talk to God about. You can pray on your own or as a family.

1 - Your family

2 - Our church

3 - Our town

4 - Your nursery or school

5 - Our country

6 - Our world

We hope you have had lots of fun with us for our first F@CT Online. 

Next week we are going to be starting to watch a series together called The Story Keepers. It's a great story about Ben the baker and his family. They live in the Year 64AD and the Romans are in charge. At that time nobody was allowed to be a Christian so we follow the adventures of Ben and his family as they spread the good news about Jesus while avoiding the Roman soldiers.

We hope you have a great week. 

Where does my help come from?

Hi everyone and welcome to Christchurch Kids. It's nearly the end of the summer holidays and this is our last look into the Psalms with Larry and Joy. We hope you've enjoyed meeting them over the past few weeks. 

Today we're looking at Psalm 121. We see Psalms written down in our Bibles but lots of them were originally written as songs. Lots of Psalms appear in the songs we sing when we are in church. Today's Psalm has been turned into a fantastic song with an animation that really brings the words to life. We hope you enjoy it.

Larry is getting ready to going back to school. It looks like he's got lots of the things he needs already. I wonder how he is feeling about it?

 

And here's that song. It's one of our favourites. It might be fun to sing it on the way to school to remind us that God is with us and loves us every day. We can sing it now too. Can you remember the actions?

We've got our verse on the colouring page today too. Maybe you would like to colour it in and put it up in your house to remind you that God is with you every day.

 You can download it here

Prayer

Today we're going to use something from our kitchen to help us pray. 

Find a teaspoon to hold in your hand.

In a recipe, a teaspoon is shortened to the letters TSP. We can use these letters to help us pray.

T

We can say Thank You that God is amazing and that he gives us wonderful things

S

We can say Sorry for things we have done wrong

P

We can say Please for things we would like God to help us with.

Spend a few quiet moments thinking of your own teaspoon prayer.

Thanks for popping by today. Next week we are going to be bringing F@CT online and we have one of our F@CT friends calling in for a chat. We hope you can join us.

I can talk to God about anything

 Hi everyone. It's Sunday on Christchurch Kids and today we are looking at a verse from Psalm 145. It's got some long words in it but Joy is going to help us out with those as Larry's finding them a bit difficult to understand.

This is our verse for today.

There are so many amazing verses in the Bible that it can be tricky to remember them. Singing them in a song is a great way to help us remember. We've got a song we can listen to that will help us with our verse today. 

We can sing along with it too.

Joy really liked that song. She's been humming it for ages. It looks like Larry has got his dictionary out. Let's find out why...

Prayer

Just like Joy said, we can talk to God about anything as he is loving and kind and understands how we feel. 

We can take some time to be quiet and talk to God about how we are feeling today. 

Have a go at drawing some cartoon faces with different expressions to remind you that we can talk to God however we are feeling.

Drawing Facial Expressions

Another way to remember a Bible verse is to have a picture of it on a wall so we see it every day. 

Here is today's verse. You could colour it in and put it up in your house. 

You can download it here

Let's join in with one of our favourite songs today. We hope you have fun singing along, having a dance and doing the actions.

We hope you have a fun week. Virtual Venture is starting tomorrow! Ventures are a holiday for children where they can make new friends, have lots of fun and learn about God. Emy usually helps out at Blandford 3 Venture for 8-11 year olds. This year we aren't able to go away for the week together but the good news is that the Venture has moved online. That means you can see what a Venture is like from your own home and for FREE! You will spot Emy online getting involved with all the fun. The Virtual Venture is in the form of a blog, just like here. That means that even if you are a bit busy next week, you can dip into the activities for the rest of August.

 If you want to join in, you can click here to sign up. 

Rooted and Fruited

Hi everyone! We hope you've had a great start to the summer holidays. Have you been out and about in any woods recently? Did you have a look at all the amazing trees? 

Today we are looking at Psalm 1 which talks about trees. Here are the verses for today.

How can we be like a tree? Larry is asking the same question today...

The children are hiding in this box here. 

Click on the video so you can watch them with Larry and Joy.

When a tree is planted in good soil and gets lots of water, it can grow deep roots. This means that the tree will grow well and be able to make fruit. When strong winds blow, the tree can staying standing.

If we spend time reading our Bibles and talking to God, we are growing roots too. We will be rooted with God. Our fruits will be the Fruits of the Spirit (which we talked about here). These fruits aren't apples or bananas but love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control.

If we find things difficult, we will be rooted and we will remember God's good promises to us . We will be able to keep close to Him

Here's that verse again as our colouring page today. You can download it here.

Prayer

For our prayer time today, see if you can go outside and see a tree (or can you see on from your window?). Place your hand on the bark and look up at the branches. Think about those roots going deep down into the ground. 

Thank you God that you will always be there for us. Thank you that we can grow strong roots with you as you will always love us and we can always trust in you. 

Amen

Here's one of our favourite songs from F@CT.  You can join in with the actions.

We hope you've had a good time being a tree today. We'll be back next Sunday with more adventures from the book of Psalms.