Jesus loves the little children ...

How cute are they?

OK, you can't see their little mugs, but what a fun bunch of 3-year-olds.

I had to share a photo of my 3-year-old Sunday school students wearing their masks we made last week during our unit on Noah's Ark. They are ravens and doves, the birds that helped Noah.

I started helping with the preschool Sunday school class at our church last year and when they decided to split the class into separate 3-year-old and 4/5-year-old classes, I immediately volunteered to teach the 3-year-olds. While last week we only had five children in class (one boy didn't want his photo taken), we have had as many as nine kids.

I was nervous about everything at first, especially since it's been 10 years since I was the parent of a 3-year-old but so far I'm loving it. It's sort of my own personal test to see how much I enjoy teaching and whether it would be something I'd like to do in the future. So far, so good. I can see the rewards that go along with teaching when the kids are having fun and learning, too.

I try to do a fun craft with the kids every week, whether it be making baby Moses baskets out of coffee filters or making hand and feet angels. The kids loved it when we painted one of their feet yellow and had them stand on a blue piece of construction paper. Then we painted their hands white, which became the angel wings and used googly eyes on their angel face.

While I don't consider myself a crafty person at all, I now find myself scanning the internet in search of fun crafts that would fit into our lessons.

This Sunday we're learning about baby Jesus and how as a grown up Jesus healed a sick man so I'm off to Wal-Mart in search of a toy nativity set that the kids can play with.

While I love my students, I can't imagine letting them play with the expensive ceramic nativity Nels and I got for our wedding last year.