First Night of PREP: a Pins to Projects Post

Tonight will be the first night of this year's Parish Religious Education Program classroom schedule. I can't wait  to meet the third graders in my class. To celebrate, I brought a couple of my Pinterest pins to life.

Traditionally, PREP was called CCD, so I created a CCD Idea board to store some ideas for the year. When I received my teaching materials, I began sorting through them to find some fun ones that fit the first week's theme: God loves us. What better way to celebrate God's love for my students than to express how excited I am to meet them? I found a pin for a blog post called Love Those Kinders. I decided to use her first idea: I've been bubbling with excitement to meet you! Here is my interpretation using Mr & Mrs Celebration Bubbles from Hobby Lobby:

Greeting gift for first night

Next, I wanted special name tags. The site www.teachcreatemotivate.com had a great set of templates for a V.I.P. themed table. This will be a terrific way to move through the lesson. First, in their journals, I will ask them to write or draw what made them VIP's. Then in the lesson, I will have them look in a hand mirror and tell how they are VIP's in God's eyes.  Finally, I will ask who are the VIP's in their lives that they communicate with, leading to the idea of prayer as communication with God. I wanted a VIP name tag specifically for each student, so I made my own with Office Depot supplies. The Avery 5151 Flexible Name Badges allowed me to print and peel some for their journals and just print others for their badges. The ones inside the badges do not have the backing peeled off:

The third pinned project I will use tonight will be a template using a shamrock to review the Glory Be prayer. As part of our discussion of God, we will talk about the Trinity. We won't have time to do the whole poster, but each will fill in the template. I'll add it to their journals after class:

These are my Pins to Projects for tonight, more to come later.
Will you share any of yours?