Sheryl Haystead loved teaching kids God's Word. These writings are from her last years of teaching Sunday School and are full of wisdom and compassion for the little ones Jesus loves so dearly--Sheryl loved them, too.
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Sunday, November 27, 2011

Worth Talking About

Do you sometimes skip over the first page of the lesson and just get right to the Bible story or the activities you will be leading? I have that tendency, too! But as I looked at the lesson overview for this week, I saw that the verse was “Be kind to everyone.” At first I thought, “That again? Don’t we teach that all the time to kids? Didn’t we just teach about doing good to all people last week? Why isn’t there something fresh and different to teach about?”

But then I realized something: here is where it starts. Here is where we build the foundation of how God wants people to give and receive love—the love He gives to us in so many ways. We hear so much talk these days about kids who grow up either being bullied or bullying others. Our hearts ache for children who are teased endlessly and persecuted by their peers. As I thought about this, all at once these lessons took on a much greater significance. This is my God-given opportunity to nurture loving and kind and good relationships between children.

So how do we go about “teaching” good relationships? I think it happens when we connect God’s Word to real-life actions. So as we made King David puppets, or tossed bean bags onto pictures of people, the class not only talked about how to “be kind,” but we teachers modeled it—and we affirmed kids who practiced it. One of my favorite parts was when a kindergartner asked if he could take home the paper on which we had written the names of people we could be kind to. “We asked God to help us be kind to all these people,” I told his mom when she arrived at dismissal time. And I told all the parents, “We talked about being kind today—just like King David was. It’s worth talking about at home, too!”