Love One Another Craft – AWANA Cubbies Bear Hug #15

This Love One Another Craft is the AWANA Cubbies Bear Hug #15 craft. For those of you following super closely, you know I am out of sync. I do have Bear Hug #14 planned, but I haven’t blogged about it yet. I wanted to get Bear Hug #15 up now because it’s so close to Valentine’s day, and this might be a craft you want to do with your kids immediately. Although it isn’t intended for Valentine’s Day, there is no reason it wouldn’t work. After all, Valentine’s Day is about love. It doesn’t have to be about the romantic kind of love. It can be about the kind of love spoken about in the Bible where we are directed to “love one another” and “love our neighbor as ourselves.” This is also intended for Cubbies Bear Hug #15. If you are just discovering this series, you can find more AWANA crafts if you hover over my “Crafts” tab. Because Cubbies Bear Hug #15 is about Jesus’ love for others, I wanted to create a craft that represents loving other people. I want to add that Jesus, in the story the Cubbies are learning, wasn’t going to the home of religious people. He was be criticized for hanging out with and loving the sinners. He shows us that His love reaches us at any level. We are suppose to be an example of that kind of love in this world. It’s big, and it’s loud. It’s about, as Christians, becoming what we are for (love, joy, peace, patience, goodness, kindness, faithful, gentleness and self control) and loving in a sacrificial way that speaks to people where they are at in life – not through judgement or criticism, but in serving and care. Our kids are learning the important verse that says, “We ought to love one another.” – 1 John 4:11. We adults better be paying close attention to that message too.

Time for the instructions. I have created for you a heart outline printable with the Cubbie verse for this week printed on it. Print out this heart onto stock paper. I chose red. You will need one heart for each child, but two pieces of paper. Stack the 2 pieces of paper and begin to cut out your hearts.

You will end up with two hearts of the exact same size. Only one will have the verse printed on it. You will want to prep these for the kids.

The next printable you will need is an outline silhouette of a boy and girl. I wanted to create a printable that would give you as little work as possible in the cutting arena. Therefore, I called in the big guns – my husband. He knows his way around Photoshop and was able to create this great printable for you with fold lines and everything. What a guy. Print this out and fold on the fold lines. Cut out around the shape of the silhouettes (just half a person).

You will end up with 4 boys and four girls, but I really only needed one of each on the white paper ones because I only wanted to use these as a template. I really wanted the people to be on black paper so they look more like a silhouette once cut out.

Therefore, I used my template and traced around it onto black paper. I folded the paper first, but I would recommend putting your person to the edge of the paper, tracing around it and then folding. You will maximize your space this way and should be able to cut out 4 girls and 4 boys per sheet of paper. When I originally considered this craft, I looked for human shaped confetti, a person stamp or some sort of small paper people they might sell at the craft store. I came up empty handed, which lead me (or shall I say my husband?) to create these for you.

Now you have your silhouettes. You will need a boy and a girl for each heart. These people represent how we ought to love all the people in the world because they are created and loved by God.

The next step is to cut out contact paper to the size of your heart. I traced around the outside of the heart and then trimmed it just a little bit smaller. You will want two pieces of heart contact paper per child, so I just stacked and cut them.

Take the backing off your contact paper and stick the contact paper to the heart with the verse. You want the verse to be on the opposite side of where you laid down your contact paper. This picture doesn’t show that great, but the verse is on the other side. You can see the opaque nature of the contact paper. The kids can begin to help at this point. Everything else should be prepped prior to your Cubbies meeting, Sunday School lesson or lesson with your kids at home or school.

 Time to set your people inside the heart. If you just lay them onto the contact paper, they will stick.

You will have wanted to prep little pieces of tissue paper. Another option is to do crayon shavings inside of wax paper like we did in our fall leaves tutorial.

Now it’s time to sprinkle the tissue paper onto the contact paper. Fill in as much of the empty space as possible.

Lay down your other piece of contact paper heart to sandwich it and seal in any exposed stickiness.

The final step is to glue on the back of the heart so that your piece looks great from either side.

Hang it in a window to give the stained glass look. Hopefully, this isn’t the only way you are teaching your kids that they “ought to love one another,” but it is sure a fun lesson to create a reminder of how we are to love others.

*If you are doing this for Cubbies, I would recommend finding a parent or two willing to be your craft prep person. As a leader, you do so much. It would be great to share the load.