I love 1st graders! Week 20

Forgiveness and love: two simple words with humongous baggage.

Today we focused on the seventy-times seven times forgiveness rule and saying we're sorry when we hurt someone. At the beginning of class, they were to take a crayon to paper to color around words on the worksheet that related to "forgiveness" or "love."

One of the words was "sin" and every single first grader asked us what that meant. After we explained it to them a few times, it occurred to me that we just opened them up to committing sin... now that they know that doing something they know is wrong is called a "sin," they can't get away with it using the naive card anymore!

I feel like a terrible person now... but in a different way, I'm glad I got to one of the ones to let them in on that definition.

Perhaps I will pop through their mind when they reflect on the word "sin" when they're driving their hover mini vans through the air, fiddling with the flux capacitor and tasting blood in their mouth rather than yelling at their spouse.

My co-teacher and good friend organized a craft for the day: Forgiveness bugs. "Catch the forgiveness bug!" we wrote on their wings. The kids haphazardly marker-ed all over the little egg carton mounds, designing their own breed of "bug."

I forgot to take a picture of one of the completed bugs, but they looked similarly to this:

They were like this, sans legs. Lady bugs don't even have legs...

When the kids were doing that first worksheet activity and coloring the words related to "forgiveness" and "love," one girl spoke up and said, "Oh no, I just circled sin."

"You can erase your sins, don't you know?" said a little boy who looks like Rolfe from Sound of Music, miniature-sized.

Why yes, Rolfe, yes you can. We can erase the grudges we hold against others as well, just catch the forgiveness bug!