Week #5

2-20-08

1. This week I spent an hour and a half in the splash and an hour and a half attending the 747 service.
2. The class this week went pretty well. When I showed up, a young boy named Christian kind of latched onto me and spent about the first ten minutes of the game time with me as we would take turns throwing a single dice and guessing which number it would land on. Pretty much this whole time Christian was being completely ridiculous. He was going places in the room that he wasn’t suppose to, throwing other things; he was crazy. After the game time, we went into a time of worship. Worshipping with the splash kids is quite the experience. We sing songs that I recognize, and some that I don’t, either way, most have motions or they do some sing language to keep them involved.

The message this week was about transformation. This is a great idea, the church as a whole, is teaching on the transformation that comes through Christ. Richele got up and talked about a passage, I think it came out of 1 Corinthians, which talked a lot about being made new in the image of Christ. She then showed a video which I thought related to the message rather well, about butterflies. The video explained in detail about how butterflies begin as eggs, hatch and become caterpillars, then finish their transformation by making a cocoon and transforming into the final, beautiful product of a butterfly. This is a difficult process, which takes a good period of time, but has the best effects in the end.

Richele then talked about how our growth in Christ is just like how the butterfly changes and grows. Then she read through the new transformation in Christ verse and while she was reading, a boy named Bradley got very excited because he had this whole passage memorized so he got up and recited this verse. He was able to relate this teaching to his own life because he had been working on memorizing this verse. They then discussed how we change to become like Christ, and how we should be looking for this transformation. One way that Richele was helping the students was by having them repeat the word “transformation” over and over throughout the morning, trying to get them to remember the word and what means to us as Christians.

3. How should we as teachers respond when it seems like the students are just not understanding what we are trying to teach?

Should we have students be working on memorizing scripture during the week while they are at home?