The Reverence Lesson - What I Did

So the Church is doing this pilot program with 11 stakes or so - they're thinking of re-vamping the Sunday School curriculum for the teenagers.  My stake was one that was asked to try it out for awhile.  So far, I'm looooving it.  Usually, the teenagers use the same Gospel Doctrine manual as the adults, which can be a little dry for them sometimes.  I had to add stuff to it to kind of...keep the kids from sleeping during Sunday School. :)  You know, object lessons, games, things like that.

With this new program, you are given six topics per month to choose from.  You choose the four that you think your students need the most.  For each topic, the church gives you some suggestions on some General Conference talks to read and some scriptures to look up, and then they say, "Go nuts!"  The outline is up to you.

It's fantastic.  It's more inspiration-driven.  We know what our kids are dealing with.  We know what they need to learn.  So I'm hoping the new program stays.  We'll see.

I chose to teach the lesson on reverance this week - something my students have struggled with.  I've been slowly getting the class into shape from where they were when I got this calling last fall.  I can say with much happiness that texting during class has stopped.  Thank heavens.  That was a hard one to overcome with these guys.  We're still working on leaning back in our chairs and blabbing too much.  But we've come a long way.

One of the talks we were supposed to study and ponder was this one by Elder D. Todd Christofferson.  One of the things he said about reverence is that how we dress is reverent/non-reverent behavior.  He said that we don't dress nicely to be like, "Look at me!"  He said we dress nicely to revere the Lord.  I love what he said about this - "It's not about us.  It's about the Lord."

As I pondered that thought while in the shower at midnight last night, LAAAAAAAAAAA!  Inspiration hit.  I decided to make a memory game on reverence.  I wanted to show certain reverent/non-reverent behaviors.  When the kids got a match, they had to say whether that behavior was making church about them or about the Lord.

Here's the game board:

I like to re-use my poster board - hence the scrapbooking paper, which is covering a project Dylan did for his class in school this year.  I'm in love with this paper, by the way.  I have big plans for this paper.  I need to make some "thinking of you"-type cards.  I've needed several of those in the past few months.  You're going to make some lovely cards, Paper.

Kay.  So I taped each square just at the top with scotch tape so that you can flip them up and down to look at them, and they stay put.  One card of each match is a description of reverent/non-reverent behavior, and its companion card is a picture of that behavior.

For instance, here's a match:

 Here's another, placed on the board and flipped up so you can see the underside:

In case you have crummy eyes like mine, the picture shows a kid leaning back in his chair and going, "Weee!"  And the description says, "Leaning back in your chair during class."  So quiz question:  Is that behavior making church about him, or about the Lord?  Ding-ding-ding!  That's right.  He's making it about him.

I had wayyyyyyyy too much fun making these scenarios.  They are all straight from experiences I've had in my class.  Hilarious.  I was giggling to myself a lot. Part of that may be because it was, like, 1 in the morning when I finished.

This is one of my favorites:

 Yeah.  I teach the 15- to 18-year-olds.  The overt, very loud flirting is prevalent. :)