Adventures in Teaching Primary

At church, I teach a primary class of kids 7 and 8 years old. Sometimes things go as planned, but often they don't. Last Sunday, I was teaching them about shepherds and sheep - as in Jesus is the Good Shepherd, and how he said that a good shepherd would leave the ninety and nine and go after the one that was lost. The manual offered a rendering of a sheep, and suggested making one for each member of the class and to write their name on it, both for those that come regularly and those that do not, to illustrate the concept of each of us being one of Jesus' fold.

First of all, check out this sheep. If you fell asleep while counting sheep and then woke up in the middle of the night and found this staring at you, would you be going back to sleep that night?

I think not.

I finished my prepared material a little early and I kind of had in my back pocket one of the suggested enrichment activities where the children could write a note to the absent class members telling them that they were missed at primary. And since I had a little sheep of paper with each person's name, I figured it would be easy enough to just use that to write the note on.

I second-guessed myself almost immediately, because is that rude, to deliver a note to someone with a sheep on it, implying that they have gone astray because they missed one Sunday?

But the activity was already underway. At least I know that I explained it well enough that one of my kids "got it":

Some kids didn't quite have the right tone:

And then there was this one:

So yeah, I decided not to deliver these. But they provided some good entertainment.