After our fireworks fiasco, I decided to start working on SELF-CONTROL with Lydia. And I figured the perfect way to do this is with the Fruit of the Spirit. The Fruit of the Spirit is basically character qualities. Several years ago, I heard a statistic that said 75% of a child’s character is developed by the time they are 5 years old. That means school does NOTHING to help with their character. If your church has a great elementary children’s church—it’s TOO late! Almost all their character qualities are formed before they even get to school! Before they do anything we consider “big”!
So, I did a quick google search on fruit themes for preschoolers. And there is TONS to choose from. The Fruit of the Spirit stuff I found was a little MORE focused on fruit (ie. apples and bananas) than the character qualities. I totally love this word picture, of course. That’s why Paul used it. But I’m going to have to work a little bit in getting a strawberry to show self-control, you know what I mean?
Anyway, as an intro we started off by painting some fruit. I drew some awesome fruit shapes and Lydia painted them. But we didn’t use any old paint–oh no! We painted with kool-aid to make some scratch-n-sniff paint!
All we did is buy some kool-aid (not the pre-sweetened) and dumped it in a cup. We added a little water and voila–paint!
She loved painting these and enjoyed matching the color to the correct fruit. After they were dry, I cut them out and we made a little fruit basket to put them in.
The next day we I traced Lydia’s body on a big piece of brown craft paper (sorry, no pic of that adventure!). We hung it up on the door along with her fruit basket and memory verse sheet. Each week as we focus on one of the fruits of the Spirit and she memorizes the verse, we will tape that fruit up. Soon, our flat-Lydia will be covered in fruit. And hopefully it will be a visual to her to have the Fruit of the Spirit growing in her life!
