God has given us senses that help us understand our world. Using all of the senses in your teaching will help children experience God and His Word in a new and deeper way. Children will remember lessons that incorporate the different senses for years. Try these ideas:
1. Sight
- Show pictures
- Ask the children to draw pictures or do artwork
2. Touch
- Collect items that would have been present in a Bible story (a mustard seed, sand, stones, a large pearl). Let the children touch and handle them as you tell the story.
- Place items in an empty pillowcase, socks or bags. Let the children reach into the bags and feel the items. They can guess what the items are and how they relate to the story.
3. Taste
- Collect small samples of foods and let the children taste them (salt, honey, lamb, unleavened bread, grape juice… anything that relates to the story you are teaching).
- A fun activity is to let the children taste foods while they are blindfolded and guess what food they are eating.
4. Smell
- In the same way you might collect food samples, you can place items in a cup or container and let the child smell the samples (perfume, lentil stew, charred wood and even rotten food like the Prodigal Son would have smelled in the pig pen). Have them guess or explain how the smell might be part of the lesson.
- Again, try this with blindfolds to make a game out of it.
5. Hearing
- When you prepare a lesson, think about the sounds that would have been present at the time of the Bible story. What would the people in the story have heard? Try to mimic the sounds for the children or ask them to make the sounds.
- If you have the opportunity, download the sounds from the internet. Click below for an example video of this.