When J was about to turn 2 we created the Creation story curriculum with him, suitable for a 2 year old. Now J is turning 3 soon and I thought of doing a series of activities with him to teach him about the Fruits of the Spirit. I wanted to make my own curriculum for J as I knew the activities that would grab his attention the best and relate it to qualities that God wants His children to have. If I can just say one prayer for my boys, it would be for them to grow to know the Lord.
The whole curriculum is 8 weeks long, and it fell conveniently during the Lent season for us this year. We covered one Fruit per week and took it one day at a time. I tried not to overload each day with activities, so we had plenty of time to talk through each activity. Our general everyday routine is as follows : J wakes up and plays with the contents of his morning bin for the day(I go over the bins in detail below). After breakfast, we start with some songs and Bible story as part of his morning meditation.Then we get into the activities for the day. I try to finish everything I planned before his afternoon nap, so we can enjoy family time with dad in the evenings.
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MORNING BINS
I set up J’s morning bins every night so he had it ready when he got up in next morning. The morning bins are for J to warm up and for us to spend some quiet family time together before the hustle and bustle of the day. Each bin has:
– 2 books : one book about a person from the Bible who loved God, one book about Love. Our favorite Bible stories to date has been the books from the Good book company.
– one simple activity that would keep J interested while I make breakfast. His current favorite are : Counting bears, Snap cubes and Melissa & Doug Water Wow pads
The contents of few of our morning bins looked like this :
LOVE
Week 1 used all the tools in his skillset, from numbers and alphabets to his scissor skills. I could see that J had lots of fun this week and we talked about God’s love and how to love others throughout the week. Check out this post for all the activities we did and books we read for the Week of LOVE.
JOY
Week 2 started with us learning all about emotions before we talked about Joy in specific. J learned the different expressions for each emotions, and the books we chose for this week were a great hit with him. The Bible stories we read were about being happy even when things are not the way we like. You can see all the details about this week of JOY here.
PEACE
I wanted to cover 2 things this week – how to live in peace with others around us who can be different than us (diversity) and what it means to experience Christ’s peace within us. As always we used activity based learning for both subtopics, and used more stories from the Bible. Check out this post for the rundown on the activities we did for the week of peace.
PATIENCE
Ah! Teaching patience to a toddler – I knew I needed a lot of patience going into this week. God willing, this will be something he will continue learning throughout his life! I tried to make the activities as fun as possible for him, and we took a lot of breaks within each activity, if he got too frustrated with it. At the end of the week, I thought he really did good throughout the week. If your interest is piqued, this post will explain every activity in detail.
KINDNESS & GOODNESS
I decided to do both Kindness and Gentleness in the same week, as I realized they can be pretty difficult to explain the difference to an almost 3 year old. We got some 10 books from the library this week and some of them became J’s instant favorites. For this week I had put together activities that went along with the books we read. It was so much fun coming up with the activities for the Week, and we also did some practical learning. You can check all these out in this post!
FAITHFULNESS
This week was the most important Fruit of the Spirit I could teach my boy in my personal opinion. Learning to put his faith in Christ week be the best decision he can make someday. For this week, our stories were ask about the men of Faith straight from the Bible. We loved using The Good book company for these stories and of course his toddler Bible. Each of our activities stemmed from the story we read each day. Check out this post for all the details.
GENTLENESS
For this week we had lots of practical activities lined up. Each activity went along with a book we read before the activity. Gentleness can be a really hard lesson to learn at this age, but these were a good start for J to learn how being gentle can have a great impact on others. Check out this post for the whole list of activities for the Week of Gentleness.
SELF CONTROL
For the last week, we repeated some activities from our week of Patience and read more books.
Overall, we had so much fun learning and creating. My prayer would be that everyone who does these activities with their kiddos will find the same joy I had making them and watching J learn about each Fruit of the Spirit.
