Mini Sharing Time for Nursery on Creation
Learn about mini-sharing times for the nursery class.
The purpose of this month is to help children appreciate their beautiful world and its creator.
Note on picture preparation: I separated each part of the picture used for this lesson into individual pictures. Since I’m not good at graphics, I just put them into Microsoft Word and used the picture tools to crop the picture. I repeated until I had each picture individually set, so I could work with each one any way I wanted, including resizing. Because of copyright laws, I can't put the pictures here for you to use. They are all from the church's website and may not be used on other websites.
“The Creation—Each Day a Gift,” Friend, Nov 1998, 34. The flannel board story on this page will be used all month in various ways.
Make a poster with enlarged versions of this flannel board story to display all month. (I enlarged mine to 150 percent.) Make another set normal sized for each child, mounted on poster board or construction paper. Make a third set for each child and one for yourself, and cut out all the pictures. The children will add a few of the pictures each week to a piece of construction paper to create a picture to take home at the end of the month. Turn your cut out set into a flannel board set.
Combine activities for months where you will only meet three times.
Songs for the month: I Am Like a Star, which we will do by having the children walk around the room with their hands held high pretending to twinkle their fingers. Another option is to give each child a cardstock or construction paper star to hold high and carry around or hold up.
Jesus Wants Me for a Sunbeam. I am trying to break the ones with older siblings of shrieking the -beam syllable. We do a sun with our arms for the first syllable and then make fists over our head and open them quickly for -beam. I’ve seen some Primaries have the children jump out of their chairs for –beam.
Head, Shoulders, Knees and Toes
Resource: The Sunbeam manual has a series of lessons based on the creation. The ideas for younger children were designed for the nursery prior to the new manual, so we will largely be using these.
Week 1:
Craft: Give each child a piece of construction paper and the pictures related to today's lesson. Let them glue it on. Collect it so they can add more each week. They will take it home at the end of the month.
Give each child their personal poster to hold. Use the large poster to tell the children about the creation. You might want to begin with a little introduction about premortal life and how Heavenly Father called a meeting to tell us about this new world we could come to. You needn’t go into the issues with Satan and Jesus, just the announcement of the earth, and then move to the creation.
As you tell about each thing that was created, point to it on your poster and have the children find it on theirs.
Do a brief introduction to the first two days (creation of day and night on the first day and heaven and earth on the second day.) The Sunbeam manual has a series of lessons on the days of creation. I am borrowing heavily from that in order to obey the requirement to use church approved resources. For this lesson, I will use the Sunbeam lesson 8. Skimming this lesson, I am particularly interested in the suggested craft of having the children glue a moon and stars onto a black sheet of paper and a sun onto a white piece. (Enrichment activity 1) This is a very simple craft if I’m not doing a month-long project.
All of the activities outlined for younger children, which were created for the nursery anyway, are appropriate for this. As I only have about five minutes, summarizing all the days and then doing these activities will fill the time.
Week 2:
Give the children flower cutouts to glue onto colored paper. Use coloring book style pictures OR Make the handprint flowers found in “For Little Friends,” Friend, May 2001. For a simpler version, draw a stem and leaves onto pieces of construction paper. Then trace each child’s hand on a new piece of paper, cut it out and let the child glue it onto the stem. You can also trace right onto the stem. I’m trying to teach gluing, since it may be needed in Sunbeams or sharing time, so we’re gluing every week.
Lesson: Review the days of creation. Then focus on the new additions—dividing land from the sea to make water, grass, trees, etc. and creating the moon, sun, and stars.
Remind the children who made these things.
Bring in real or pretend flowers, or pictures of them. (The Sunbeam manual, which you may still have in your nursery, has cutouts of flowers.) Talk about the beautiful colors of each one.
Do the poem from lesson 10 in the Sunbeam manual: “I Dig.”
Play “Growing a Garden:” Have the children kneel on the floor and pretend to dig a garden. Ask each child what he is planting. (You may find some children trying to plant candy bars or puppy dogs.) Help them dig, put in the seed, cover it up and water it. Now they turn into the seed. Have them crouch down low and slowly grow taller and taller until they’re stretched up high. Repeat as desired. If you want a song, use the song, Once I Was a Baby. Change the words to "Once there was a little seed."
Review the poem God’s Creation from Sunbeam manual Lesson 9.
Week 3: The fifth and sixth days were animal and fish creations. Children love animals.
Craft: Let the children glue paper fish onto blue paper.
There isn’t time to spend a lot on both animals and fish, so you’ll want to choose. I am doing fish, because we did animals in the Noah lessons.
Begin, of course, by reviewing the days of creation so far and remembering who created the earth. Use your posters for this.
Play the fishing pole game. Tie string to a stick and tie a magnet to the end. Make paper fish with paper clips on them. Let the children fish by having the paper clip match the fish. This is tricky, so you may want an adult on the floor helping. Lesson 11 in the Sunbeam manual has this game and a pattern for the fish. We are doing this during playtime at the end of nursery since we have to combine two weeks into one.
Look to lesson 11 for all your fish activities. There are a number of really cute action rhymes in that lesson. You can do the entire sharing time with just those.
Week 4:
You’ve actually covered the creation days, but you haven’t done people yet, so this lesson is about the creation of people and also a review. If you only have three weeks, add the people to the previous lesson.
Craft: Lesson 23: I Love the Scriptures,” Behold Your Little Ones: Nursery Manual, (2008),96–99. There are three pictures from scripture stories in this nursery lesson. They are joined together, so put them into your word processor or graphics program and crop them so you have only the Adam and Eve picture remaining. Turn them into both flannel board pictures for you, and a stick puppet for each child. Let the children color their stick puppet. Alternate: Have the glue the picture onto a paper and draw flowers and trees around them. (They don’t really draw at this age, so accept beautiful scribbles.)
After reviewing the days of creation, tell the children you’ve left out something very special—people. Show a picture of Adam and Eve. Tell the children they were the very first people ever created. Place the flannel board version on your flannel board and add some of the nature pictures you’ve used recently. Tell the children they lived in a beautiful garden for a long time after they were created. All the animals were nice and they could even pet lions. (Children are always interested in this fact.)
Do the action rhyme found in the Sunbeam manual lesson: Lesson 14: Adam and Eve Were Created in Heavenly Father’s Image,” Primary 1: I Am a Child of God, 42. The rhyme is called Adam and Eve.
You may want to sing the Adam verse of Follow the Prophet during this lesson.
If you have time, or later while waiting for parents, set out the pictures of the creation you made at the very start. See if the children can put them in order of creation. They most likely can’t but it can be fun to play with. One way to do it is to give each child a picture to hold and then help them line up in the right order. You might want to make each child a sturdy set and try this periodically while waiting for parents.