I'm not bragging, but....

I rocked Primary singing time yesterday :)

My steady readers (hi, Mom!) know that one of the most difficult things for me is getting 12 or so hearing kids to pay attention to me at the same time without using my voice. They just prefer English. So why don't I just use English? Because someday, we could have a Deaf kid show up, and I want us to be ready, and I want that kid to have a good experience. But some days, I feel like doing singing time in ASL is an exercise in futility.

But a few things changed with the new year. First, we have shorter church. So the kids are less tired when I get them. Boo-yeah! Second, we had 4 little 3-yr olds come into Primary form Nursery. That meant we would have 5 big kids, 4 medium kids and 4 little kids. That's a lot of kids! We decided we could split our singing time into two groups. It's been the Best. Thing. Ever. I can be silly for the little kids without any eye rolls from the big kids, and I can do complex things with the big kids without losing the little kids.

I'll be honest that I've never been as good with the little kids as the big kids, even when I'm not working in ASL. But yesterday, I got all 8 of them paying attention, participating, and even (gasp) SIGNING!

I started off asking each one individually if they made a snowman when it snowed last week. This is because only one would look at me at a time for long enough to catch the question :) Ha ha. Then I started to draw a snowman on the board. And it was funny. And the kids started raising their hands to tell me what I needed on the snowman. They signed arms, so I asked if they wanted spaghetti arms. And I drew spaghetti arms, and they all cracked up. Finally, we drew an appropriate snowman, and I put up snowflakes with songs written on the back, and we picked songs and sang them. It was so fun. And we even learned our new song for the month!

I think not having any whiny big kids helped a lot. But most of all, I just felt like it was an answer to prayer and effort. I love these kids, and I just want Primary to be a happy place for them. What a blessing!

p.s. - after I wrote this, I realized what the sound was that got the children's attention - it was laughter.