Teaching about Bread

It has now become a tradition for Ewe to go teach a short unit on bread to our church preschool each year before they go on a field trip to Great Harvest Bread Company. Last year I did the lesson planning so this year I just went in and taught the lesson. This year's class is smart and asks a lot of questions and had a lot of comments about everything I said. Ram said he has to tell them during chapel to come talk to him at the end of the school day in order to lead chapel without too many interruptions which means he has to be at church at 2pm on chapel days. I wish he would have told me that before I went in to teach today!

First I read a big book of Bread, Bread, Bread by Ann Morris.

Then the students received bracelets with the Bible verse "I am the Bread of Life" and we talked about what that verse meant.

Then I got ready to read The Little Red Hen by Paul Galdone.

Before I read the book we talked about all the words in the title. We sang the R-E-D song. I had planned to show the YouTube but Internet was down at church today. So we just sang the song without pictures. We talked about hens are female.

Then I passed out masks for each child to take a part as hen, cat, dog, or mouse. We had a couple of each part besides hen so that everyone could have a part. One of the mouse masks was broken and I didn't have time to fix the string so the little boy made the best of it. Then I read the story and each helped with their part by saying "Not I" or "Then I will".

It was fun to volunteer to teach them today. It was a nice change of routine plus it satisfies that small part of me that wishes I was still teaching in the classroom. A bigger part of me wants to stay home with my Lambs so I'll gladly give them back to their teacher after 25 minutes!

I don't have an early childhood degree and I doubt I will ever complete one, but it is very interesting all the ideas that teachers can get and share with each other on the Internet today. It is so different than when I began teaching in 1996. It was fun to look for ideas of what to do during my short time with this class.

I used this website to create my lesson plans last year and the class last year did more from that website than the class did this year. If this was my class I would go a lot farther with Bible stories with bread in them and especially talk about the bread and wine at Holy Communion.