I love finding age-appropriate activites that encourage Noah to learn about his faith, and more importantly, about God's love for him. He fully embraced the "yarn manger" activity during Advent... in fact, he routinely continues to ask... "Do I get any yarn?" when we tuck him in at night!
So, to begin teaching him about Lent and about God's grace, we are doing a Jelly Bean activity this year. To say that he is excited about it would be quite an understatment!
So here is how it works...
I started out by attempting to explain to him that because we love Jesus, we want to become better people. In order to become closer to Jesus, we need to practice doing the things that Jesus wants us to do, things like...
pray more...
share the gifts we have with other people...
be obedient...
show love to other people by practicing the golden rule...
I don't know how much of this he understood, but I'm cutting him some slack because he is only (almost) four years old!
To encourage him to practice doing these things, he is going to earn jelly beans during Lent. He gets to fill up an empty jar with his earned jelly beans, which to an (almost) four year old, seems to be an incredibly exciting thing to do!
Here are the jelly bean bags....
Yellow: Yellow reminds us of the sunshine (son). Jesus is God's son and so whenever Noah prays to Jesus, he puts in a yellow jelly bean.
Red: Red reminds us of love and how much Jesus loves us. Whenever Noah shows love to someone or performs an act of charity, he puts in a red jelly bean.
Green: Green reminds us of the garden where Adam & Eve lived. It reminds us that God asks us to be obedient to him and so whenever Noah demonstrates (no arguing) obedience, he puts in a green jelly bean.
Purple: Purple is the Lenten color and reminds us of the sacrifice that Jesus made for us. Whenever Noah offers a sacrifice (gives something to God that he really likes!), he gets to put in a purple jelly bean.
White: The white jelly beans are FREE. They remind us of God's free gift to us... grace! The white jelly beans can't be earned, just as God's grace can't be earned.
So we began filling up the jar tonight....
Noah earned 3 jelly beans...
Red for sharing his balloon with Sissy (an act of love)
Yellow for saying prayers at night and praying for Heidi
Green for being immediately obedient in putting his golf clubs away
You'll have to stay tuned to see how the story ends! It has a special ending on Easter morning! Hint... it speaks to how God's grace "fills us up"!
For now, we'll enjoy watching the jar fill up for the next 40 days... at least I hope it gets filled up!
And with God's Grace, Noah will have "become better" on Easter!
What a lesson!
Truth be told... it's probably going to teach me just as much, if not more, than it is Noah!
5 comments:
Ahhhhh, my friend does this with her kiddos. Sooooo cool!!! I can't wait until Gemma is old enough!
And yes, Gemma's height has always been higher in the percentile range. Although I think recently she's kind of evened out at 60%...still, she's a long little gal.
I am impressed with the idea of using different colored jelly beans for each virtue they practice. What we've done the past few years is add dried kidney beans for sacrifices, then on Easter "Jesus" changes them into Jelly Beans. Your idea encourages specific behaviors (especially if they like that color to eat!). Thanks for the idea!
i love this twist on the sacrifice bean jar.
I like this Lenten idea - a larger sacrifice when they are dropped into the jar w/o eating...
Where did you get the bulk bags? Linky? I spent an hour on JellyBelly.com - how many pds did you get of each color (I have three kids, too).
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