Usually at camp I am a pretty creative and active teacher. I use a lot of teaching techniques to keep the class thinking and discovering for themselves. This year our study was in the Minor Prophets, with the aim of seeing "How Great Is Our God." We have a morning class of an hour and fifteen minutes and an afternoon class of forty five minutes. I made a decision that the sophomores would read, or hear read, as much of the texts of those books as possible. Paul set the scene for each reading and then one of the guys would read the message of God through the prophet. The kids were then asked to create a MySpace bulletin that might be sent to the rest of the campers to transmit the message they had just heard.
I went to camp thinking that at least half the kids would fall asleep during the readings. I mean, it is hot and the kids are tired and the messages are, in some cases, long and a bit repetitive! I figured that for the first time in my camp experience they would find my class boring. But I wanted them to hear the Word of God so much that I was willing to take the chance.
We did have a three or four that could not keep their eyes open, but I was pleasantly surprised at how many read along with the "prophet" in their own Bibles. I was even more pleased at how much they understood the main message of the various texts, especially the traits of our great God!
It made me wonder how I could have doubted that the Bible itself would not suffice to teach those precious kids. And it reinforced my idea that we all need to actually read it more than we do!
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2 comments:
Hey ff&f, I was posting about pampered campers and thought about how different church camps are these days than when I was a kid. I popped in here to see what you'd written about camp (I coasted by the title a week or so ago, but didn't get to read it then). I really like your ideas. Did your kids post the My Space pages? Do you have a link to them?
No, Hifidel, they did not post them, at least we did not post them at camp. We had no access. We used paper copies of bulletin page from myspace to do their exercise.
What I would have done if we had had the access is have the kids creat myspace pages for the various prophets. I think that wopuld have been a fun learning activity!
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