Scripture: Matthew 13:1-23, Mark 4:1-20, Luke 8:4-15
Learning Objectives:
- Students will learn Jesus told parables to help people understand godly principles.
- Students will learn every parable has an important lesson God wants us to learn and follow.
- Students will learn we must be careful not to let other things push God out of our lives.
- Students will review multiplication and division using plants and produce.
Guiding Question: How does God stay the focus of our lives?
Materials: paper, pencils
Procedure: Review the Parable of the Sower. Remind students that Jesus used parables to teach others lessons for living a Christian lifestyle and godly principles. Have students share what they believe is the one biggest lesson for the story that Jesus was trying to teach. Expand on students’ thoughts and explain that Jesus wanted to remind us not to let other things push God out of our lives. God should be the first priority in our lives. When we let other things in our lives become more important (school, work, money, etc), it tends to push God to the side. We can keep God first by praying, reading the Bible, talking with godly friends, etc.
Introduce the activity. Have the students practice multiplication and division using plants and produce. For example, if a tomato plant produces 20 tomatoes and you have 9 plants, how many tomatoes do you have? Be sure to model how to solve the problem before providing students with additional problems. This can be turned into a team game as well. Put one problem on the board, have a team race to answer it and get the answer right. First team to do so gets a point.
Additional Questions: How can creating a garden help students with multiplication?
Supplemental Activity: Have students draw out a large garden to fill with whatever they would like. Have the students make arrays with their plants to practice multiplication. Example: An area of a student’s garden could have 5 rows of 4 sunflowers. How many sunflowers are there?