Where The Wild Things Are - We Can Make Choices

Sunday October 21st was our seventh session together. This week we covered Unit 2, Chapter 5 "We Can Choose What Is Good". In preparing for the session, I established the focus as God gives us free choice and wants us to make good choices. The lesson plan for the session includes the topics discussion, the activities worksheet, and craft activity.

Packing Light: If you just want the activity sheet for this session, you can find it here. It has a coloring activity, maze, and word search activity.

When we met in the common area for the whole group activity, we learned that Courtly Polar Bear won "Religious Ed", our fancy jack-o-lantern! Congratulations!

We started off saying the opening prayer from the workbook pages, a paraphrase from Deuteronomy 30:20

"Love the Lord, your God, and obey His word."

"Do we have to obey God?"

"Yes!"

"Why? Who makes us?"

"God!" "Your Parents!"

"I don't know about that, is there someone standing and pushing you all day saying 'you have to be good' or 'you have to do that'?"

"No way, that would be crazy!"

"Right. God gave us free choice. We can make choices. We make choices every day. Now of course God would like us to always make good choices, but he doesn't make us make the choices"

And so we proceeded to review choices that were hard and choices that were easy. (There was some dispute as to whether choosing what clothes we are going to wear was an easy choice or a hard choice~)

"How do we know when we made a bad choice? How do we know how to make good choices?"

(MULTITUDES of answers!)

"Well, let's read a story together and talk about it. We're going to read 'Where the Wild Things Are' by Maurice Sendak."

"Yeah! I love that book!" (said most) "But that doesn't have anything to do with church or Sunday school" (said Rocking Horse)

"Read it with me and let's see."

And so with each child taking on a different role, we proceeded with the Reader's Theatre. I thought I might need to do a lot of prompting and helping the children figure out "where are we?" - but Rocking Horse, our Narrator, quickly took on that role and was terrific at it! We had a rollicking rendition, complete with plenty of rolling of terrible eyes, gnashing of terrible teeth, and showing of terrible claws!


"Why do you think Max's mother sent him to his room?"

"He was being really mean and nasty!"

"Did Max make some bad choices? What choices did he make?"

"He was being mean to his mother." "He ran away."

"Why did Max return home?"

"He was hungry!"

"Is that the only reason?"

"Well, he was lonely too." (said Effusive Jaguar)

"And beside being hungry, what did the smell of dinner remind him of?"

"His mother was at home!"

"Exactly. And how do we know that his mother forgave him and was happy for him to come home?"

"She made his dinner" "Even though he was not supposed to have dinner because he was mean" (said Sweet Pea Elephant) "And it was still warm!" (said Fair Cheetah)

"So she forgave him even before he asked her to?"

"Yes!" "Just like God!" (said Sweet Pea Elephant)

"Let's read another story together. Jesus told this one."

"Yeah!"

So we read through the BlestAreWe Prodigal Son story, with the children shouting out the words whenever we encountered a picture.

"What did you think of that? Another son who didn't make very good choices!"

"Hey, that father wanted him to come home just like Max's mom!" (said Courtly Polar Bear)

"He sure did, even though the son made some bad choices. What bad choices did the son make?"

"He took all the money" "He ran away from home" "He lost all the money"

"But still his father forgave him. Just like God will forgive us when we make a bad choice. Does anyone know what a 'conscience' is?"

"I do! It's like an invisible person that stays with you and tells you what your mom would want you to do" (said Rocking Horse)

"Very good! God gave all of us a conscience. And when we need to make a choice, we should listen to our conscience and it will tell us the right choice to make. This is hard! And Jesus knew it would be hard so he gave us something else. Does anyone know what else Jesus gave us to help us?"

"Jesus?" "er, ah" etc.

"Remember, from Baptism?"

"Holy Water!" (said Pragmatic Tiger)

"He gave us the Holy Spirit. When we need to make a choice, the Holy Spirit and our conscience will help us know what to do"

And so then we drew pictures of monsters, as a reminder that when we are making bad choices, it's like we are a monster just like Max.



















Then we cut out some pictures of Max and his monsters, and we stuck them all over a plastic sack that we can use for Halloween trick or treat!



While the children were coloring, I continued to pester:

"By the way, what color was Father wearing this week?"

"Green!"

"And did we sing the Gloria or just say it?"

"Sing it!" "And I was horrified because I don't know it" (said Sweet Pea Elephant)

"And how about Holy, Holy, Holy?"

"Definitely sang it!" "I am finally getting use to that" (said Effusive Jaguar)

"You guys are awesome!"

I sent home the Family Time pages for Unit 2, Chapter 6, which we will be discussing next session.

I am so glad the children seemed to enjoy today's session. I have been looking forward for WEEKS (like a kid at Christmas!) to using one of my favorite books!

Side Trips: if you want more information, activities, and games...

• If you just have a bit of time, definitely go for the online activity for this chapter at Blest Are We
• If you have two-bits of time, check out the coloring, crossword, and word search activities on the Prodigal Son at Catholicmom.
• For more in-depth activities, check out some of the links in the lesson plan there are many articles and activities on Prodigal Son and Good Shepherd.