Any activity done with students during a Bible class should help them process, understand, remember and/or practice the basic principles and commands embedded in the Bible story or other scriptures attached to the lesson. At times though, you may have students who have other important needs that can also be addressed. Perhaps they have experienced trauma or are struggling in reading (making it difficult or impossible for them to read the Bible independently). How can you address these additional needs while not ignoring the primary purpose of the activity for spiritual education purposes?
It can be done, but you will need to know your students well and analyze various activities. You will also need a site like ours that provides multiple activity ideas for each Bible story. First, decide what special additional need you believe should be addressed. In addition to the examples above, you may have had something locally that upset your students in some way or you may know your students are struggling with a particular behavior or pastime that isn’t particularly godly.
Don’t assume what your students need unless you know them really well. I will never forget a group of middle school kids leaving their Bible class rolling their eyes. When I asked what had happened in class, they were appalled an entire class had been spent on internet bullying when these particular kids were barely online and not on social media yet. If you are unsure, ask your students or their parents.
Once you have your need isolated, look at the activity for the Bible lesson that has already been provided. Will it give them help with the issue you identified in some way? If not, could it be tweaked or changed to reinforce the story and meet this additional need? Recently I was working with a group of young children who had experienced trauma. The story was Abram moving from Ur to the Promised Land and being told at a very advanced age that he would still have children. The assigned activity was building an obstacle course and running around the room. Since this activity had no educational value to begin with, I decided to change it entirely.
I knew that because of their trauma, these children needed to learn to express their emotions to minimize them acting them out in less healthy ways. I brought in my emotions chart with the faces and lots of emotion words. I asked to name some of the emotions Abram and Sarai might have felt during the course of the story. Even though they were in kindergarten and first grade, they came up with some great words. We then discussed the importance of using their words instead of other negative ways of expressing their emotions. I asked them to name some more emotion words and since most of them couldn’t read, I had them guess what emotion they believed the various faces on the chart expressed. We even made a few of our own emotion faces for people to guess the emotion. I then asked them to point to the emotion they had felt the most at school that week. During the course of the lesson, I included other interactive activities that reinforced the lesson and the principle of following God’s commands even when we don’t understand them or like them.
The children not only thought more deeply about the story by putting themselves in the shoes of Abram and Sarai and naming possible emotions, they worked on building their emotional vocabulary, were encouraged to use their words instead of physical violence and learned a little bit about empathy. While doing those activities, we didn’t ignore the story because the activity involved reviewing the story to complete it.
Addressing more than one need in Bible activities takes a little extra time and practice, but it allows you to serve your students even more than you already are. It also allows you to accomplish multiple things in the limited amount of time you have with your students. And for some of your students, it could change everything.
