Nursing homes, Hairspray,and marshmallows

Well the title sums up what I have done the last few days. You are probably trying to figure it all our right now... We will start with Wednesday when we went to the Nursing home. Last week our two Wednesday night girls classes made crafts to take to the nursing home. So we went and the girls read the Easter story out of the Jesus Storybook bible. I love that bible! Afterwards they handed out their crafts and we just hung out for a bit. It was so great to see the girls talking with the elderly people. Some of the girls surprised me because they are really shy and they were really enjoying themselves. It was awesome to see that:)  We are going to keep going back and doing different things, so I think it is good for the kids to experience something new. 
Thursday night I made plans to hang out with a couple of the girls that had asked to help on with the Good Friday service. I knew that they were excited and really wanted to help so i thought it would be fun to go over the plan and everything and hang out. We had so much fun and these girls were full of great ideas :) We also watched Hairspray and ate junk food..Girls night! Had so much fun definitely doing Girls nights more often.
 Tonight was our Good Friday service, and this is the first year we have really done something. The adults watched Passion of the Christ and took communion.  The kids definitely had fun..we played Easter bingo and used giant marshmallows as our markers. FUN!!! but we still were very serious. I used the What's in the Bible volume 10 church edition and it worked out great! Thought this was really good for kids! There were 4 videos and after each video we had a small discussion and activity. Since we only had nine kids we didn't break up into small groups. The third video was the longest and it went into more depth about Palm Sunday, Good Friday, and Easter. After the video we had seven stations, and we had an activity and small discussion at each station. We were basically walking through the whole story. The first was Passover tradition so the kids colored the door ( picture) red, the second was Palm Sunday so they all colored palm branches, third was the last supper (loved this station) all the kids got a piece of bread and they put their piece of bread down on the picture and we took a few minutes just to think about what it means to us, fourth Jesus prayed in the Garden and so we had huge pieces of paper and the kids either got to write or draw a prayer, fifth was the cross and the wrote the word sin on paper and made it ugly and then crumpled it up, sixth was the empty tomb Jesus has power over death so we threw the papers in the trash can, and seventh was the sunflower seeds and here we talked about God's Kingdom. We used the seeds as an illustration, and just like these seeds will grow with care we can Grow God's kingdom if we work at it. (praying for people, being nice, showing God's love) I am not sure what the  kids took from tonight,but I hope as they are home that they think about the things we talked about. I hope that the seeds remind them of the things they learned. I really hope that Easter is more to them then candy and Easter bunnies. All of that is fun but they need to know what it really is about and why we celebrate Easter. If you need help sharing this with your kids I would definitely suggest going to www.whatsinthebible.com/  There are lots of videos and resources to help your children understand and know what Easter is all about. 
Have a great weekend! :)