Sunbeam Lesson The Sabbath

Welcome everyone by name.

Practice the Hand Raising game. Children at this age need to practice hand raising without calling out. We usually start each lesson with a small snack and we practice raising our hands to respond to questions without calling out.  We will make statements like, “Raise your hand if you like graham crackers,” or “Raise your hand if you are wearing red today.” We emphasize that they can answer the question not with calling out, but by raising their hands.

Have the children all stand and do some kind of exercise. Jumping jacks is the easiest, but you can use anything that will tire them out in a few minutes. Tell them to do the exercise for as long as they can, and when they get tired, they can stop and sit down. Ask them how they feel after working so hard. Guide the discussion to how they might feel if they weren’t able to rest, but had to keep on going. What might happen? Explain that our minds and bodies work hard for us every day and to be healthy we need to rest.

There is a great two minute HooplaKidz video about why we need sleep on Youtube.

Remind the children about all they have learned regarding the Creation. Remind them how Heavenly Father and Jesus worked to create the whole world and everything on it. Ask the students to recall some of the things they have learned. You should have pictures of the creation to help remind them: land, water, plants, fish, animals, people etc. Explain that after all that hard work, Heavenly Father and Jesus put aside a day to rest and think about what they had made.

Tell the children that our bodies need rest, but so do our minds and our spirits. Rest keeps our bodies healthy, but our spirits need to stay strong and healthy too.

Show a picture of Jesus. Ask the children to quietly think about Jesus and how much he loves us. Tell the children to continue to think about Jesus but bring in many distractions. You could bounce a ball on the table, turn on some non-church music, bring out a board game or some toys. Ask the children if it was a lot harder to continue to think about Jesus with all those other things around. Explain how all week we have other distractions that keep our minds busy and it’s hard to think about Jesus. Sunday is the day when we should rest our minds from all those other things and only focus on Jesus. That is what we mean when we say Sunday, or the Sabbath, is a day of rest.

Tell the story of Moses leading the Israelites back to Canaan and how God sent manna to them every day except on Sunday. They had to prepare for that by gathering extra manna the day before. You can make manna as a snack for the children, although not sure how many will eat it! A simple snack that will be close to manna is any puffed wheat cereal. The taste, size and shape are really close to the descriptions we have of manna.

Instant Manna!

Give some examples of how we can prepare for Sunday by doing things to prepare for it. You can have the children do a game of charades of things like putting clothes away, putting out Sunday clothes, cleaning their room, getting their scriptures out etc.

There are coloring pages that can be printed for the children to color while you relate the story of the Israelites. Or use pictures to illustrate the story as you tell it.

Give children the cube template and point out how there are pictures of things they can do on Sunday. Ask them what they think the pictures show as they color them in. You can leave two of the sides empty for the children to draw a picture of other things they might do on a Sunday such as bake cookies, call grandma, color a picture etc. When they are done, put the cubes together and show them how they can throw it up in the air and choose to do whichever activity lands face up on the cube.

You can play a game with the children about Sunday activities. Make each child two popsicle stick signs. Cut out a circle of green with a smiley face on it and glue or tape it to the top of the popsicle stick. Make another circle out of red with a frowny face on it and glue or tape it to the top of the popsicle stick. Use the chalkboard, or print off, or draw pictures of many different kinds of activities. If the children think it is good to do on a Sunday, they hold up the smiley face green stick. If they think they should not do it on a Sunday, they hold up the frowny face red stick. You can play the game several times seeing if they can answer faster each time.