The Brick Wall

First, I would like to say this is one of the hardest songs I have taught to Jr. Primary. There are a lot of difficult words to understand, but I think they'll get it with time and repetition. Also, if you are looking at this sight and are NOT a member of the Primusic group on Yahoo...go get on. It's a great forum for many brilliant chorister minds. I was inspired by some of the comments and of course had to twist it into something totally crazy....so here it is.

How Firm a Foundation week #2
My second week of the month is always "Repeat Week". So I find interesting ways to help the kids repeat the song as many times as possible so it's burned into their minds.

Prep:

Card board bricks: I know this isn't a resource that most people have. I happen to get these at a garage sale last summer. If you do not have these and wish to do this, I would suggest possibly getting some Styrofoam bricks from the craft store, you could use baby wet wipe boxes (if you have enough of them)...or possibly even those plastic zip lock containers....or you could do a smaller version of this using children's wooden building blocks. (I was inspired by the Jenga idea so you could do this with a set of Jenga blocks as well.) **Stacy in the comment section suggested Kleenex boxes. I love it! It would be such a great substitute for these blocks. She also put a great link for the bricks...go check it out.

Action strips: Type out some different ways to sing the verses such as: Boys sing, Girls sing, Hum the song, change the tempo, you lead....etc. The idea here is to give variety, but to allow the repeated singing of the same song so it doesn't get boring.

So, before primary..build the wall. The Word strips can be facing the kids or you could hide them on the inside of the bricks so they don't know what they are going for. I am going to leave several bricks without a action strip so they can get a bonus try if they don't get a word strip.

Basically you'll ask someone to come up. They have to try and remove a brick from the middle or side of the wall and place it on top of the wall without it falling. I had my four year old try this by herself and she did very well so I am confidant that we would be able to go several rounds before it would spill over. You could assist Jr. Primary to remove the bricks if you're nervous about it. The motivation here is...if it spills over we have to sing the entire song straight through...so they will be very careful.

I will sum it up by saying that when you are not careful with your testimony (if you don't pray, read scriptures, obey mom and dad...etc) you will leave holes in your testimony that eventually will cause your FOUNDATION to collapse. You need to always be working on making it strong .

Some bricks removed

*Originator: The Crazy Chorister