St Peters Ireleth

This morning I went over to St Peters Ireleth.  After singing Inright Outright to warm everyone up I started to talk a bit about time, like what wakes them up in a morning, and how short 5 minutes seems to be at bedtime.  I had an old clock with me and I moved the hands to different times during the day like the start of school and lunch time etc.  I told the children that I have an alarm clock that wakes me up in a morning and in fact two alarms go off.  We then played a little game, I asked the children to imagine 1 minute or 60 seconds and when they thought 1 minute had passed they should stand up.  Most of the children stood up at around 50 seconds with 4 children standing at 56 seconds which was great.  I then picked up an apple and asked if anyone had an apple tree in their garden - hands went up, so then I asked the children what appeared on the tree before the apple.  I did get a number of interesting tree related answers like seeds, twigs, leaves and branches the answer I was looking for was flowers or buds which someone gave me in the end.  Now I asked the question who or what tells the tree to produce the flower so that the fruit can grow?  I asked if they thought that a tree had an alarm clock inside it that told it to start making the fruit.  I told them the name given to it and showed a picture of the apple cycle from seed to plant to tree to bud to flower to apple and back to seed.  I asked 3 children to come out and read some verses from the bible two from Genesis about how God produced the fruit with the seed in it and that as long as the earth continues there will be cold and hot, summer and winter, day and night.  The other verse was from Ecclesiastes which tells us that there is a time for everything.  I then asked the children to think about this time of year as it is harvest time when we thank God for all the wonderful things we have in creation which led me nicely into Creator God.  Following this I said a prayer followed by the Lord's Prayer which I pointed out has the words Give us this day our daily bread.