The Lesson on Councils - What I Did

I'm such a nerd.  I thought it was already August.  So I prepared one of the Sunday School lessons that was supposed to happen in August.  Ah well. 

The lesson is on councils - meaning, meetings that you have within the church.  I was a little worried at first - How am I going to teach a class for an entire hour on meetings??  But I did a lot of thinking and praying and research and came up with an outline and activities with which I was happy.

The online curriculum came up with this first idea, and I utilized it:

These are some scriptures on councils - why we have them, blessings we receive for having them, and the correct way in which to meet.  The summaries on the right don't necessarily match their counterparts on the left.  The curriculum suggested to have the kids look up all of the scriptures at one time and draw lines to match which scriptures go with which summary.  I tweaked it a bit.  We would look up scriptures at different times during the lesson - when the scripture demonstrated a certain point we were discussing - and then we would pause, read the scripture, and draw the lines bit by bit throughout the entire lesson.

The lesson talks about how important it is to listen to each others' ideas during councils.  Everyone should speak and contribute.  And everyone should be listened to.  I remembered an activity I did once in Young Women's - we each brought a white elephant gift to a Christmas party, and to decide who got what, the leader read this story aloud:

Every time she said the word "right" or "Wright," we passed the gift in our hands to the right.  Every time she said "left," we had to pass our gift to the left.   And at the end of the story, the gift that was in your hands was yours to open. It's really a funny process.

So I decided to have us do this game to demonstrate the importance of listening.  I arranged my students in a circle, then had them pick out a button from my button stash:

Then they passed buttons to the right and left while I read the story.  They had a good time, and it drove home the importance of listening.

Yes, some of them asked if they could keep their button.  No, they're not six-year-olds.  They're teenagers.  They crack me up. :)