It's Monday, but What Worked on Sunday?

This first post looks backwards, but I hope that future ones look forward to coming lessons.

Like me, you may have finished teaching yesterday Lifeway's "Explore the Bible" lesson series taken from the book Jeremiah. The last lesson was titled "Avoid Arrogance" and the illustrations and object lessons I used seemed to work well with the Encouragers Class at Champion Forest Baptist Church in Houston. As I sometimes experience, the teacher preparation material from Lifeway is not especially helpful in terms of illustrations, or object lessons. That's when I go hunting elsewhere on the web for better teaching ideas.

The "running a red light" data from Steve Smartt's column in the Florida Baptist Witness worked well to make the point that arrogance can be fatal. Except, my PC-to-computer-projector video of a fatality resulting from running a red light didn't work. The Powerpoint slides I used worked well, but when I launched MS Media Player to play the video, the projector screen went dark after playing the video a few moments. I had tested everything prior to the lesson, but not with the new projector in the classroom yesterday. Argh!

The "crush an egg object lesson" also worked well to demonstrate the futilty of operating out of arrogance. I found this in the Supplemental Teaching Plan posted at on Hampton Road Baptist Road website, www.hrbc.org. This plan seems to be updated each week on Thursday. Note: I used plastic eggs and not real eggs to avoid a mess!!

I also used the arrogance anecdotes suggested in that plan in addition to the example of the arrogance of Joseph Pultizer power hungry life. The "chair lift" exercise to demonstrate the futilty of arrogance from the Supplemental Teaching Plan did not draw a distinction between a man and a woman as promised. Either can get their center of mass too far forward and fail to stand while holding the chair.

The chair lift implementation description was not detailed enough for me and after hunting around a bit on the web, I found a decent explanation from a scouting website. See "place a chair against the wall" in Webelos.

How did your "Avoid Arrogance" object lessons, illustrations, demonstrations, exercises, etc. work in your class?

Today, we start preparation for next Sunday's lesson "Rely on the Lord's Faithfulness" out of Lamentations. I'm already thinking about how to illustrate the key points: Expressing Remembrances, Remember the Lord's Persistent Love, Recognize the Lord's Purpose and Acknowledge the Lord's Power. The Lifeway Extra idea of showing an old photo of myself to jumpstart a discussion of the Lord's purpose in my life is interesting, but somewhat embarrassing. I'm searching for alternatives now....