Singing Time: I Lived in Heaven

I know that most of you who actually want ideas on how to teach this month’s song already had to come up with an idea. I really liked my idea but I did it a little too complicated and it wasn’t ready to post in time to give you ideas but I thought I was really good.

This month’s song is: I Lived In Heaven.

Since the song sings like a story I thought I would teach the song like a story. I created the pages to read like a book, and the pictures to look like a photo album. I did everything out of construction paper. That many pictures cutting out the small pieces of construction paper takes a lot of time. If I had wanted I could have used a simpler form of art work- ie images off the internet, one of the fancy gospel centered art idea books, stickers, pictures out of the Friend ect. But I have a talent for construction paper artwork, so that is what I think of first. I still haven’t finished the third verse’s pictures yet so I will have to post those when I am done. When a page was open the left side had the words.

The font I used is the basic Comic Sans font done in “outline” so I could color in the words. That was something else that took so long. It was a lot of coloring. One of the teachers asked why I don’t just print it in color. Maybe I should of, it would have saved me a ton of time. However, I want to save my color ink for when I print a picture since I can get a set of markers for a dollar. I colored each verse the same color, the first verse was colored purple, second was green, and the third was blue. The right side is where I tried to make the page look like a scrapbook. I’m not a scrapbooking person, so this was hard to think through for me, I am also not a girly frilly girls so the harder I tried they just looked girly and silly to me. Oh well. I then put all the pictures in the sheet cover sleeves, and then into a three-ring binder.

As we sang the song I flipped the pages. In the future I will take some of the pages out of the binder and have children hold them for me. I like when I find ways to involve children. They behave better then.

I only taught the children the first verse in Junior primary, I may have been able to do the second verse, but I didn’t want to push my time. But we easily did both 1^st and 2^nd with the Senior Primary. We could have even had the time to do the third verse, but since it wasn’t finished I didn’t want to, so we sang through the first two verse a couple more times and then I just gave Sharing time an extra 2 minutes. For future lessons with this song I plan on putting all four pages of words on the board, and then all for pages of pictures. I will have the children match the pages and after they are matched we’ll sing that one line, then once we get all of the lines matched with the pictures we’ll sing the whole verse.

My husband has the idea of teaching each class one line of the song. I could have their teacher help the class learn that one line (after introducing the song to everyone) then we’d focus on getting the song all together by having that class sing louder on their line. I think this concept could work really well with the Senior Primary, I’m just a little skeptical how well with Junior Primary.

I am looking forward to this New Year. Since we now have church in the morning, I have the goal to focus on my next week’s lesson after church. Then maybe I will be better at sharing my ideas than in the pre-sense than I have been.

Happy New Year!!