Crazy Kids

As I mentioned before, Jason and I are the new teachers of the 10 and 11 year olds in our Primary.* As I also mentioned before, this sort of scared me to death.

We have 5 boys and supposedly 2 girls. I say "supposedly" because I've only seen the girls once and that was the Sunday we were just helping out, not actually teaching. And, you know, it's great that ALL 5 BOYS have been coming to church, but that means we have ALL 5 BOYS in the class. 2 of them have ADD, I'm pretty sure a 3rd does as well and besides that, they're 10 and 11 year old boys.

A week ago was our first week. The lesson was on King Benjamin.** I had this bright idea to make a crown out of cardboard (a cut up Kleenex box) and aluminum foil, then have the kids come up and each play King Benjamin by wearing the crown and reading one of the king's teachings from the scriptures. Jason made a Power Point presentation with pictures that we showed at the end.

I figured the kids would either love the whole crown thing or think it was totally lame. Turns out, they loved it.

In concept, this was all orderly and nice, but in reality the kids would be quiet for oh, about 2 seconds, and we would only get through the first few words of the scripture before we would have to tell someone to be quiet or sit down or put his chair down on the floor. But they loved wearing the crown and being the king and saying things like, "Silence! The king is speaking!" before they started reading, which cracked me up.

I totally understand. They're kids and this is the 3rd hour of 3-hour church and they're about ready to jump out of their skin after having had to sit for 2 hours already. I mean, sometimes I find it hard to get through 3 whole hours of church.

This week Jason gave a talk in Sacrament Meeting*** so I planned the whole lesson. I was thinking that the best thing to do would be to get the kids out of their seats. This week the lesson was on Abinadi and King Noah. So I brought the crown back and 3 of the boys played King Noah, Abinadi and Alma. Then one of the other boys was a narrator. Right off the bat, one of the boys got really mad that I didn't pick him for King Noah. Whatever. Eventually he joined in when I told him he could be a guard and lead Abinadi to prison. He liked that.

I labeled parts of the room "Prison", "Wilderness" (where both Abinadi and Alma got to run to and hide, which they interpreted to mean huddle in the corner and cover themselves with coats. Ooookay.), and "Court", as in the King's Court. King Noah and Alma sat in the court area (Alma was wearing Mardi Gras beads to signify his riches and jewels obtained from King Noah's heavy taxation of the people). After running away and hiding, Abinadi came back in disguise (a ski cap and dark sunglasses). The boy playing Abinadi also identified himself as "Bob" because, see, he was in disguise. All the boys totally dug the fact that Abinadi and King Noah got burned alive and we had some dramatic death scenes (I taped construction paper flames on the wall).

I had a whole script written out, but I think we probably got through a third of it, maybe. We got the whole story out, but we skipped big segments of this nicely scripted stuff I had written. There is no script when you're surrounded by chaos.

And there was chaos. They all LOVED it, but they went a little nuts, running around and yelling. I figured it was better than trying to keep them quiet and seated, but it was definitely draining. I told them at the end that we need them to act good in order for us to do fun things like this. I don't know how much sunk in. We also had a member of the bishopric there to help and he gave them mini lectures periodically, which were fine, but I feel like it's giving the impression that he's the real authority because, as Jason noted afterwards, "They seem to listen to him more than us." Maybe we're just not commanding enough. Maybe it's the fact that he's in the bishopric. Or maybe it just signals to the kids that we're not really the ones in charge.

After class, the kids left and Jason went to go put the Books of Mormon away and I just sat in the classroom, reveling in the silence.

We have next week off, but we'll be back in 2 weeks. I really like doing creative lessons and getting these kids active, and they really like it too, but Jason and I apparently have no clue how to keep the chaos under some semblance of control. Any ideas?


* Mormon Sunday School
** We're studying the Book of Mormon stories right now so apologies to those who aren't Mormon and don't know these stories.
*** And it was great!