Saturday, June 23, 2012

Parking Your Car

Right before I tell the Bible story, I like to help the youngest children get focused by doing a few activities that I call "Pre-Class" activities.  These are generally the same every week because young children like routine.  This activity is one of their favorites.


This project was made from a shoe box. 
The inside of the shoebox is shown.
(See instructions below.)

 
When we are using this, I have a plastic bag full of small metal cars.  I let each child pick out a car they will drive to the church building that day. 

When each child has a car, we sing some songs such as the following:

The wheels on the car go round and round
Round and round, round and round
The wheels on the car go round and round
On the way to Bible class.

We sing many verses such as

The horn on the car goes beep, beep, beep...
The lights on the car go blink, blink, blink...
The people in the car go up and down...
The wipers on the car go swish, swish, swish,
and much more.
While we sing, the children "drive" their cars on the table.

After singing a few songs like that, each child is asked to "park" his/her car in the church parking lot so we can go in and learn about God.  Each child drives their car into a parking space, we put it away, and begin telling our Bible story for the day.  This is great for setting the mood!

Instructions for making the project:
1. Get any shoe box that has the lid attached.
2.  Open the shoe box and cut the edges off the lid but keep the lid attached.  See picture below.

3.  Turn the box around to where the open flap is sitting on the table like the top picture above (that has the cars on it). 
4.  Get scrapbook paper that looks like the outside of your church building.  The church building where I worship has bricks so I chose bricks. 
5.  Laminating the scrapbook paper will make your project last longer.
6.  Cover the outside of the shoe box with the scrapbook paper. I hotglued mine.
7.  Take a good picture of the outside of your church building.  Print in large enough to take up as much space inside the shoebox as possible.  (See 1st photo above.)  Laminate if possible.  Cover the empty space around the photo with leftover brick scrapbook paper.
8.  For the parking lot, I found a clipart that looked like a parking lot, blew it up printed out two pages, laminated them, and taped them together.  I typically just set the parking lot page on the lid of the shoe box while using it without attaching it.  I found it easier to store that way. (I store the bag of metal cars in the box as well.)
9.  Purchase some metal cars. 
10.  Enjoy!

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