For the month of July, the 2017 Outline for Sharing Time gives you the option of teaching The Wise Man and the Foolish Man, or a song of your choice from the Children’s Songbook. I chose to pick my own song for mainly 2 reasons:
- The kids KNOW The Wise Man and the Foolish Man. It’s a song that we regularly sing as a wiggle song. It’s got great movement/actions and the kids love it. Since they know it so well, I wanted to jump on the opportunity to teach a new song to them.
- I wasn’t sure they could sing the song for the program without doing the actions. I’m not sure I could do it so I just took the safe route and decided to not include it in the program.
But even though it won’t be one of our songs for the program, I still plan on discussing the meaning of the song and singing it during part of my singing time one week in July. I thought Susan Fitch’s cute houses HERE would be fun to bring in:
She used them in her primary class as follows: “I put a rock inside the stone cottage before I glued it together. I asked the kids to try to blow them both over.”
I figure I’ll have 2 houses up on the front of the table and have kids take turns blowing the houses down as we sing, repeating so everyone can have a chance to try. Pretty simple. Between turns we’ll quickly discuss what it means to build your “house” upon a “rock” vs. “sand.”
As you repeat the song, gradually remove the words while keeping the actions. Removing “wise man,” the first round, then removing “house,” then “rock,” etc. until all the words have been removed from all verses.
If your primary is behind in learning program songs for the year, I’d HIGHLY recommend staying with this song for July and using the extra weeks in the month to play catch up – teaching and reviewing all the previous months’ songs.
If your primary is all caught up and is ready to learn something else, here are my suggestions that coordinate with July’s theme, “I Choose the Right by Living Gospel Principles” that mostly came from the Topic section of the Children’s Songbook under “Choice”:
- Choose the Right Way p. 160
- Dare to Do Right p. 158 (find my lesson plan HERE)
- Every Star Is Different p. 142 (find my lesson plan HERE – this is what I chose!)
- Hum Your Favorite Hymn p. 152
- I Believe in Being Honest p. 149
- I Need My Heavenly Father p. 18
- I Will Follow God’s Plan p. 164 (find my lesson plan HERE)
- I’m Trying to Be like Jesus p. 78 (find my lesson plan HERE)
- Listen, Listen p. 107
- Teach Me to Walk in the Light p. 177 (find my lesson plan HERE)
- Teacher, Do You Love Me? p. 178
- The Holy Ghost p. 105 (find my lesson plan HERE)
- The Still Small Voice p. 106
**note that I only included songs from the Children’s Songbook in order to stay with the recommendation that the choice be from the songbook.
For ideas for teaching the songs where I don’t have a lesson plan linked, I’d reference the following:
- A Children’s Songbook Companion. Find details of this book HERE.
- Sugardoodle HERE and search for the song alphabetically.
- Search past files on Primusic on Yahoo Groups (find details HERE)
- Google, Pinterest, Facebook (Chorister’s Group HERE), or other singing time blogs of course – I have several linked to the right and scroll down!
What are you teaching this month? Leave a comment to help someone else decide!
4 thoughts on “The Wise Man and the Foolish Man”
Awesome and lovely songs from them all, I liked "I Will Follow God's Plan" the most due to the title/topic that shows something positive.
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We're doing "Our Time to Shine" from The Friend. It's so pretty!! Perfectly fits the theme, too.
How about "Keep the Commandments". We are going to sing both verses and learn the descant (moving it to D major so it isn't as high).
We are doing 'I want to live the Gospel'. I only wish you had a lesson plan because I love all your ideas and use them often. 🙂 Thanks!