Away We Go!

This month at GIFT, we kick off our "Faith Journey" theme.  The symbols to introduce our monthly topics will come out of a fabulous old, avocado green, hard-sided suitcase.  This month's session is titled, "Getting on Board," and the object in the suitcase is a boarding pass.  Remember those?  I know it's a dated symbol, but I liked it too much to let it go.  The main themes of this session are having a positive attitude about growing in our faith and getting to know the people who are there to help us on the journey.  We also dip our toes into the faith journey field guide - the Bible.

Opening Activity/ Discussion Starter

As kids and parents arrive, they pick up the Getting on Board worksheet to complete at their tables.  It's a pretty simple, straight-forward matching game about who does what when you fly on a plane.  Then, after revealing the boarding pass as our symbol for this session, I hand out bookmarks that look like this:

When you place the bookmark on the worksheet and line up the pictures, you can see how on our faith journey, our parents are like our pilots, coaches and teachers our copilots, etc.  When I'm talking through this with the kids, I point out that even though our teachers and coaches may not be talking to us about God, they are teaching us Christian values like hard work, cooperation, and respect.  I also stress that the kids are like the passengers - their main job is to listen to the people who are there to help them, especially their parents.

Download the pdf of this activity

 

 

Crafts & Paper Airplane Activity

We have a lot of activities for this session!  The kids make their own name tags, but I won't go into the details of that right now - if they hold up as well as I hope, I will dedicate a post to how to make them.  Because this is our first session, we also get started on the "progressive craft" that we will add to at each future session.  This year I have made it easy on myself by purchasing a kit from Oriental Trading Company.  Their travel-theme VBS products from this past summer offered me some great options.  We are making the Awesome Adventures Foam Cross.  We will add a different foam sticker to it each month. 

But my favorite activity for this session is the paper airplane game.  First, kids make a paper airplane.  Then, they fly the plane at a "game board" which is just a large piece of foam core board divided into 4 numbered sections.  Whichever number the biggest part of the plane lands on, they take that numbered activity card from the table.  The card then directs parents and kids to look up something in the Bible, discuss a few questions, and do a quick activity.  The kids like it for the airplanes; I like it for the parent/child time spent together discussing Scripture.  How often doe that happen?  (Note: we use the "Breakthrough Bible" by St. Mary's Press; some content is only found in this Bible)

Download the pdf of the activity cards

 

Closing Prayer/ Commitment

For our closing prayer, each child is given a boarding pass like the one I pulled from the suitcase.  With a closer look, the kids can see that the coding at the bottom spells out "Got 2B Open."  We talk about approaching GIFT and Mass with an open heart and mind.  The kids write their names on their boarding passes as a sign of their commitment to do just that, and then the parents whisper a little blessing over them for the year.  They turn in their passes, which will be hung in the Church commons, so that our parishioners can pray for them, as well.

 

Download a pdf of the boarding pass



 





So that's our start to the year...and we're off!