Aug. 4th, 2009
Blog delayed due to security reasons.
One of my favorite things about working in San Vicente is the variety of hats I'm allowed to wear. I'm not talking about physical hats, although they are important enough with the desert sun beating down upon heads and the temps over 100 degrees this week. It feels like I'm stuck in a looooong hot flash!
The hat of "sewing teacher" has been tucked away with the boxes fabric and the "children's ministry" hat is taken out and dusted off. This week's focus will be training eight preteen and teenage girls who are affectionately called the "Angels". They are a group of special young ladies from the local church who minister alongside of Dave and Lynne Johnson, missionaries here in San Vicente, Mexico. My task this week is to better equip these girls to work with children. Three of the girls have recently moved to the area and one of my challenges is to integrate them into the rest of the group, most of whom are related.
I've decided to expand the way that they teach bible memory verses. The education system here in Mexico relies heavily on memorization and most students have well trained minds in this. However, a weak link is often seen when it comes to the understanding of what has been imprinted. So armed with simple tools; paper, markers, and our Bibles we began isolating parts of scripture and creating visuals to help expand the children's grasp of the memory verses. On the first day the girls really struggled with the fact that they are not artists and we talked about using symbols to express ideas. Later in the week, that got easier as the girls were able to take the scripture verse that we worked through in the morning and utilize it with kids in a migrant camp in the afternoon during a Vacation Bible School outreach.
The bible verse cards we made are used in a type of "People Shuffle" game. Several children receive a card with just 1-3 words of the memory text as well as a simple drawing in order for them to understand the words. One of the angels would go through the memory verse and with the visual cards explain not only the text but also the meaning behind it. Next we would all say the verse together and the kids would arrange themselves in order as we said the phrases. Thirdly, the children with the verse would mix it all up and then other kids in the group would put it back in order. Lots of laughter would well up when the kids would hand off the cards to the adults and then the children would move the adults around trying to get the words in the correct order. Oh course, we couldn't resist swapping cards and trying to confuse them. But, they kids always succeeded in righting our confusion and had a blast doing it.
Picture above is part of what the angels created to teach John 6: 14 "After the people saw the miraculous sign that Jesus did, they began to say, "Surely this is the Prophet who is to come into the world." Notice some of the visuals they used, an earth for "the world", an eye for "saw", and a bunch of stick people to represent "people".
More later this week.Lori
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