Tuesday, January 31, 2012

Song Review - "As a Child of God"


For old times sake, I thought I would share with you all what I did to review “As a Child of God.”  I put the phrase pictures up on the board and asked a child to leave the room. I asked another child to choose one of the pictures to remove. We shuffled the remaining pictures around a bit to make it harder to spot, but if the guessing child is young, you may want to leave the pictures as they were. When the child came back into the room, we sang the song again to help them discover which picture was missing. Naturally, I asked the child to give the answer in the exact words of the song. If the children had a hard time, we sang the missing phrase together and then repeated the whole process.

The other review activity I had prepared was a “Pop Quiz” with questions about the song. The questions were written on orange slips of paper and placed in an Orange Crush bottle.  A child shook out a question and then had to answer it in the exact words of the song. Naturally, we had to sing a little to help them out. The pop quiz is just a fun way to help the children review and focus on the words of the song.


This year I have only five older kids and the rest are quite young. I think they need a little more time with our new song, before I ask them to learn a hymn. Since they already know "Stand for the Right," I'm going to trade months and teach "Choose the Right" in March. I'm currently planning a great "dramatization" to teach "Choose the Right," with kids holding props surrounding and singing to a child in the middle of the circle. I'm hoping that the mental images of acting out the song, together with the props, will help the little ones especially. I'll share when I get all the props ready. It will be too late for most of you, but I'll share anyway.

Wednesday, January 18, 2012

A New Blog - Link

You will have noticed that chorister blogs come and go. That is just the way of things, I guess. We get released, or we post all our good ideas, or we get involved in things other than blogging! Thankfully, when one chorister blog slows down, others appear to fill the need. I can tell that Nalani's new blog will be another great resource among many good blogs out there. She recently posted a fabulous explanation of the melody map that you won't want to miss, and her teaching plan for "A Child of God" is very thorough. I hope you'll visit - say hello for me.