Exciting news! I am starting a new series, which will provide craft ideas for AWANA Cubbies. Even if your child is not doing Cubbies, these will be great crafts for you to do at home with your kids or in a Sunday School class. Today I bring you our first craft, “God is Love” Tambourine – Cubbies Bear Hug #1 Craft. AWANA Cubbies is a great program run in churches around the United States. It’s a program that helps you train your children up to know the Bible better and begin to understand and hopefully fall in love with God more. Cubbies is the AWANA program for preschool age children. I would encourage you to find an AWANA program in your area. My church asked me if I would be willing to create crafts for the Cubbies program at our church. I thought it was a great fit for me. If you are a leader in Cubbies, I encourage you to find someone who might be willing to take on this responsibility. I am coming up with a craft idea that ties in with the lesson and prepping it for the teachers. I also go shopping for any materials we might need. I have a friend helping me with all this too. Since I’m doing this anyway, I thought it would be a great resource to add on to my blog. If you know of AWANA leaders or churches in your area, I would really appreciate you spreading the word. I really do think this could be super helpful in easing some of the responsibility of the leaders. I am hoping to make all the crafts theme/verse related, age appropriate, fun, creative, inexpensive and a great teaching tool. I will provide useful printables where appropriate. I’m excited to be able to offer this resource. You will be able to find all Cubbies crafts if you hover over the craft tab. I will create a sub tab that will take your directly to all of the projects. The title will be labelled with the Bear Hug number for easy accessibility. Please let me know how I can make this more accessible to you. Also, please, please, please spread the word. I need you to let the churches in your area know. I plan to prepare ahead of time (I have 5 completed right now) and will get them up on my site quickly so you leaders have time to prepare as needed. I normally do all crafts with my kids, but because they’ll be doing them at church, I am giving you a tutorial based on my own examples I created with a friend.
The first theme is based around the verse, “God is Love.” The title of the lesson is, “God, the Creator, Loves Me.” The Bible story is based around King David. The story takes place before he was a king, and talks of his time as a boy tending the sheep in the field. It talks about how David loved God and experienced God being out in nature. It also talked about how much David loved music and would worship God through poems and songs he created. A lot of these poems included talking about God’s creation and the amazing world he made. I combined the thought of seeing God in nature and worshiping God in music to create these fun tambourines.
Materials Needed
Paper plates – with a stiffer, rounded bottom (2 per child)
Stapler & staples
Nature stickers
Crayons or pens
Popcorn, Beans or Rice (rice is a little more susceptible to leakage
Print out the “God is Love” printable and cut around the circles in preparation for your Cubbies meeting. You will need one circle for each child.
We collected nature stickers (a lot of them came randomly in the mail), and you can let each child choose a certain number of stickers. I decided on three per child based on our 30 kids and how many stickers we collected. They have great foam and nature stickers at the Dollar Store…ours does at least. The kids will also have a chance to draw their own nature items with crayons or markers. Brainstorm with them what they might be able to draw. If they are too young to make it look like a picture, just let them color their tambourine how ever they would like.
Once colored, staple the two plates ALMOST all the way around the edge. Leave a gap at the top to pour in your beans, popcorn or rice. Keep the staples close, so the innards don’t leak out.
Pour in your popcorn, beans or rice. You can use a paper funnel to make it easier to get things inside the two plates. We didn’t find it necessary. Staple the rest of the way around the edge.
Your tambourines are complete. Now you can talk about David and his praise. You can sing worship songs to God with your musical instruments.
This is a very good idea. For myself, i make / force my children to watch hid me in your heart dvd . At first, they did not like it but now, my son is singing the songs. They have catchy song on that dvd.
Btw, i subscribe in your site so, i hope you will not get tired of me commenting all the time. Blessings to you and your family.
Great idea! I will make sure to pass this on to our AWANA cubbies leader!
Thank you so so much for passing it on. I really want to be able to get the word out to help the leaders. Just followed you on Google+ too. Excited to get to know you more.
Thank you, thank you Jodi! You are a blessing to our Cubbies team! Love, Abby
Thanks, Abby. I’m glad I can do it for you guys!
Thank you so much! I am new to Cubbies Awana this year. I have lead 2 classes already and am at a loss. This will really help me out.
So glad you found this helpful. Thanks for stepping up to help out at Cubbies!
I’m a Cubbie leader at my church. I just found this of coarse at the end of the year but will be saving this for next year! I was wondering if this was for Appleseed or Honeycomb and also if you are going to put them together for the opposite one. Thank you so much for posting!
Hello. I’m so glad you found me. I hope you know that I have a whole bunch of AWANA crafts. Just search my site for “AWANA Crafts,” and they should all pop up. I believe this was for Appleseed, since I did it last year, and my son is in Honeycomb this year. I was going to create more for Honeycomb this year, but AWANA has been working very hard to create crafts in their new curriculum, so I haven’t needed to go through the process. I have prepped the craft for our Cubbies, but I have just used the materials in the new Cubbies program. I hope that helps. Let me know if you have any more questions.
I used this as a “Hosanna Tambourine” for Jesus triumphant entry before Easter. It was a big hit for the 2-4 yr old Sunday School class. Thanks for the idea!
So fun! Thank you so much for letting me know how it was used. I love to hear these stories. Super encouraging.