Day Three: Chicks in Africa

Day three in Missions we talked about Africa. I had to clarify that though we had been talking about countries the past two days, now we were talking about an entire continent, with a lot of different countries and cultures within it. I had the kids name countries in Africa to help them realize how many there were.

Our animal of the day was the chicken. We talked about how in the bible in Genesis, God created the chicken before the egg (maybe laying that question to rest?), so Heifer Project gave chicks to families in need, not eggs, since eggs require incubation to grow into chicks, which in other countries, they don't always have. We discussed that chickens eat seeds, weeds and moss, they peck up the ground and fertilize it, which is helpful for the earth, sometimes people build pens over fish ponds so the droppings go into the water to become algae for the fish to eat, chickens don't need a lot of space and the eggs and the chickens themselves are both good for eating and selling. A few kids told us about their families' chickens that they helped take care of. We learned a story about a family that moved to Mississippi to start a poultry farm using chicks from the Heifer Project. They had various issues go wrong and solicited help from their community to solve them--fortunately there was a demand for these healthier, tastier chickens, and they managed to get the support they needed to meet the demand.

Then I asked them a "serious" question: Why did the chicken cross the road? There were a lot of fun responses, though every group wanted to know what the "correct" answer, but really that was just a question to get the creative juices flowing :) And of course, we ended with the chicken dance.

That afternoon, we focused on Africa. I had come up with some simpler African dance moves from combination of my own background and some refreshers from YouTube. We acted out a story in which a person gets courage from dancing with a lion, and then we all danced together the African dance I taught. The music was random music I found on the internet a few years ago, that I decided was good to dance to. All of the groups really enjoyed this story (I believe the most), and the dancing. The youngest group, since we spent less time trying to get them all quiet and paying attention, had a lot of extra time at the end, so we played a few rounds of freeze dance, which became quite the game later that week.