top of page
Friends With Others

Unit 12 / Lesson 3

Friends With Others

Slides for the Lesson

Click for slides
(they may take a moment to load)

Teacher's Prep

  • Games

    • Human Tic Tac Toe

    • Stacking Cereal

      • Materials:

        • One table per group of four

        • Hand sanitizer (to use before touching food)

        • One bowl per group of four

        • A box of Cheerios, or Froot Loops, Shreddies, or other cereal that is easily stacked

    • Team Pen

    • Main Activity (Card Making)

      • Assemble supplies to make fancy greeting cards. For example:

        • Cardstock/construction paper

        • Stencils

        • Crayons, pens, pencil crayons

        • Scissors

        • Tape, glue sticks

        • Stamps, stickers

        • Paper trimmer, envelopes

      • You may want to prepare some fun music to play in the background while kids make cards.


Intro

SLIDE 1

  • Gathering

    • How was your week?

  • Intro Game: Human Tic Tac Toe

    • Instructions

      • We'll start our lesson with a game called Human Tic Tac Toe.

      • For this game, we'll need a bunch of chairs in the middle of the room, so everyone please go to the side. I'll set up some chairs while you watch the video on how to play.

    SLIDE 2

    SLIDE 3

    • Instructions for teacher:

      • Follow the instructions in the video

      • Set up nine chairs in the middle of the room.

      • Have all the children find a partner that is about as fast as them.

      • One partner joins team X, and the other partner joins team O

      • Teams number off so that when you call a number, one person runs to the chairs.

      • Before each round, each person not on a chair has to be touching the wall.

      • In the original instructions, only one team gets to sit down per round. For a less competitive game, both teams can sit down per round.

      • The optimal (but boring) strategy is for a team to sit only in the column of chairs closest to their wall. If teams start scoring in the column closest to their wall, you can say that having three people in that column doesn’t count.

      • Alternatively, you can play regular tic tac toe on a whiteboard, or switch to another puzzle type game

    • Debrief

      • In this game we played, we needed at least three people to win! One person can't win all by themselves. The more you work together, the better your chances of winning will be.

  • Relevance

    SLIDE 4

    • Life is a bit like that too. God has made it so that we need other people. But, it’s not always easy working with others. Sometimes it can feel like everyone else is on a different team from us. But, if we’re great at making friends, it will be like having tons of people on your team.

    SLIDE 5

  • Big Question

    • Our big question today is: How can we be great friends with other people?

  • Big Idea

    • Our big idea today is: We need to do our best for people. 

    • This means that:

      • 1. We need to love people with our actions, and

      • 2. We need to love people with our thoughts


  • Bible Reference

    • We'll learn these ideas from the second half of the Ten Commandments. The first part of the Ten Commandments was about loving God and being friends with Him. The second part of the Ten Commandments is about loving and being friends with people.

    • Let's watch a little video to catch us up on what's going on in the Ten Commandments. It's the same video as last week, but it's good to keep these things in mind.

    SLIDE 6


    Point 1

  • Our first point is, we need to love people with our actions.

    SLIDE 7

  • Game: Stacking Cereal

    • Instructions

      • We'll start our point with the cereal stacking game!

      • We'll make teams of four people each, and each team will have their own table. Your team will be making a tower of cereal.

      • We'll see which team can make the tallest tower in five minutes!

    • Debrief

      • We played this game because it's about being as excellent as we can be. We don't just want a small tower, we want the biggest tower we can get. So, we need to be careful about how we place our pieces of cereal. We want to put them exactly in the right place, so that we don't get problems later on.

      • This idea helps us to understand the Ten Commandments properly. Some people think the Ten Commandments are just a bunch of rules, and we're okay as long as we don't break the rules. In reality,

    SLIDE 8

    • The Ten Commandments are about being as excellent as we can be, so that we can have the best friendships ever.

  • Bible Reference

    SLIDE 9

    • Now let's read the 5th commandment, all the way to the 9th commandment:

    • Exodus 20:12-16 (International Children's Bible)

      • 12 “Honor your father and your mother. Then you will live a long time in the land. The Lord your God is going to give you this land.

    SLIDE 10

    • 13 “You must not murder anyone.

    SLIDE 11

    • 14 “You must not be guilty of adultery.

    SLIDE 12

    • 15 “You must not steal.

    SLIDE 13

    • 16 “You must not tell lies about your neighbor in court.

  • Explanation

    • If you're reading these verses as just a list of rules, you could get into trouble. For example, it says you must not murder anyone. Obviously you won’t make a lot of friends if you go around killing people. But, what if you went around hitting people as hard as you can, as long as you didn’t kill them? We don't see a rule against hitting people, so is that okay? No!!

    SLIDE 14

    • But if you're reading the commandments the right way, you'll see that the commandments will stop you from being a mean person. You'll see that there's one rule about every part of life. There's a rule for family, a rule for our bodies, a rule for married people, a rule for the things we own, and a rule for our words.

  • Application

    • The right way to read the rules is to say, we are going to do things God's way in every part of our life. For example, we’re going to respect families, bodies, marriages, and words. If we respect people like that, and they respect us the same way, we can be great friends.

  • Discussion Question

    SLIDE 15

    • Let’s pause for a discussion question:

      • Do you have any ideas for how to be great friends with other people?


    Point 2

  • Our second point is, we need to love people with our thoughts

  • Game: Team Pen

    • Instructions

      • We'll start this point with a game! It's called, "Team Pen."

    SLIDE 16

    SLIDE 17

    • Let’s form teams of five people each. Everyone on the team will hold one string, and you'll work together to draw a picture.

    • I'll tell you a picture to draw, and then you'll have three minutes to draw it as nicely as you can.

    • Pictures to draw (one round at a time)

      • Zebra

      • Octopus

      • Pizza

    • Debrief

    SLIDE 18

    • We played this game because it's about working together. We need to move our hands together in order to draw a picture properly.

    • Moving our hands properly starts in our minds. We need to be thinking the right things first. If one person wants to draw a zebra and another person wants to draw an elephant, your group is in trouble!

    • So, the tenth commandment is about thinking the right way, and wanting the right things.

  • Bible Reference

    SLIDE 19

    • Let's read the tenth commandment from Exodus 20:17:

      • “You must not want to take your neighbor’s house. You must not want his wife or his men or women slaves. You must not want his ox or his donkey. You must not want to take anything that belongs to your neighbor.”

  • Explanation

    SLIDE 20

    • The tenth commandment is about wanting the right things. It says we shouldn't want to take other people's stuff. The idea is, we can’t have our minds full of bad ideas. Instead, we need to fill our minds with good and helpful ideas.

  • Application

    • The Bible tells us the right things to think about.

    SLIDE 21

    • Let's read from Philippians 4:8 (ICB). It says:

      • Brothers, continue to think about the things that are good and worthy of praise. Think about the things that are true and honorable and right and pure and beautiful and respected.

    SLIDE 22

    • It’s right to think about these things. When our hearts are full of good ideas, that's when we will be great friends. If all of God's people can do that, we can be an amazing group of friends together. That is God's good plan for us.

    SLIDE 23

  • Discussion Question

    • Let’s pause for some discussion questions:

      • What's an example of a bad thing to want?

      • What's an example of a good thing to want?


SLIDE 24

Conclusion

  • Let’s wrap up our lesson by going over the big ideas again.

  • Our big question was: How can we be great friends with other people?

  • Our big idea was: we need to do our best for people. That means:

    • 1. We need to love people with our actions, and

    • 2. We need to love people with our thoughts

  • If all of God's people can do these things, we can all have great friendships.


SLIDE 25

Main Activity: Card Making

  • Today, we will be making fancy cards! Making cards reminds us of our lesson because cards take work. We need to work with our hands and also with the ideas in our minds. If we do our best to love people with the work of our hands and our ideas, we can all be better friends with them.

  • You can make a card for your parents, or for your friends. Maybe if you’re fast you can make a whole bunch of cards, and you can write a nice note in each of them.

  • Teacher: provide materials and tables, and supervise card-making. You may want to play some fun music in the background.

We'd love to hear from you!

What can we do better? And what did you enjoy? Your insights will help us to serve churches better!

bottom of page