Saturday, February 13, 2016

Sunbeam Bean Bags- LDS Primary Helps

I have a new calling in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints- Rosewood ward. I am one of three Sunbeam teacher. We have 11: 3-year- old children in our class. Nine of them are boys and two girls. I LOVE IT!! In January all of the 3-year-olds move from the Nursery (a free play two hours with a 20 minute lesson) to the Primary/Sunbeams (a two hour class split into a group lesson, singing time and a class lesson). It is a difficult adjustment for these kids. The first week this year we had a couple of kids that wanted to poke each other, hug each other, climb on their seats, and move around.

I thank my Heavenly Father for sending an impression to me, "they need something to keep their hands busy."

During the week I had been making and playing with the pyramid bean bags from my previous post. I was having a lot of fun with them. I had my kids outside making catapults and flinging the beanbags as far as we could. We also found an old science fair board, cut holes in it and had a beanbag toss.

So why couldn't I put the two things together?

These are the ones I started with :)

 
We learned quickly that we needed some rules to go with them.
-You have to sit on your pockets to be able to hold one of the bags.
-You can hold them with your hands or put them under your seat.
- Do not throw the beanbags.

This worked like a charm. We were able to get most of the kids to stay with us on their chairs with the chance to hold the beanbags.

After a couple of weeks the kids started getting bored of the same beanbags so we needed to evolve.

We turned it into a bit of a challenge. If they followed the rules of the beanbags they could hold the beanbag for as long as the wanted during opening exercises. During the first couple of minutes of class time they could guess what was in the beanbag. This gave me a chance to be a little creative! I started week one of this challenge with rice in the bags. That was a challenge. But I had a small plastic bag to show them what the rice looked like.

Last week we tried five marbles. This was easy for a few of them. Because I can get a little fixated at times I got to work.


Then I needed a way to sort and store them :)


 
 
I also needed to run to the dollar store to find more things to put in my bags:
 
 
I had a few "rules" for myself this time.
-They couldn't make too much noise when pushed together
-I wouldn't mind if they got broken
-They needed to be something familiar to at least some of the kids

I'll keep you posted with how this works out.

Happy SUNBEAMing!!