Hezekiah sundial craft

I’m back to teaching Sunday School and in my current class, we have an extended time for crafts AND a bigger craft budget so I get to plan bigger and more fun crafts for our Bible lessons. We’re almost done with our study of the Divided Israel, and we learned about Hezekiah last week. One of the cool parts of Hezekiah is God does this miracle where he watches the sundial move backward, so we made a sundial craft for our lesson.

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Supplies for the sundial craft

Okay, there are a lot of ways you can make this, and I made my sample different from how we made it in my Sunday School class, my kids had the opportunity to make it in two different ways, so I’m going to give you the supplies for all of the different versions:

What every version will need:

• appetizer paper plate (honestly the cheaper the version you have the better, notice my sample is made with something treated so my markers do not stick and it doesn’t look as great when I colored it)
• something to color it, pick your poison:
  • markers– always popular with kids
  • crayons– I love crayons, I’m weird like that
  • dot markers– very popular with my Sunday School kids
  • circle stamps– another way to color with my kids, we use these for games frequently
  • watercolor paints– I don’t know that I would do this, but it could be a fun option
• colored cardstock
• gluestick
• scissors

Okay, here are some fun ways you can create the numbers for the sundial craft:

• do it old style and scavenge magazines and newspapers for numbers, this is what I did for my sample because I forgot to get the other ideas
• number stickers– some of the kids chose this route and had fun with it
• number stamps– most of the kids did this route, partially because we did not have enough stickers for everyone to do this and the stickers we had were not colorful

Here is my quick caveat for my sundial craft

I know this is a craft and not an actual sundial. I did not put the work in to make it actually work.

This looks cool, but I do not think it actually functions. So do not think it will actually tell time if you line it up.

I’m saying this so no one makes my sundial craft and then says, “Ticia! It doesn’t work! Why doesn’t it work?”

Because I never tried to make it work, that’s why.

Okay, now to actually make our sundials.

How to make the sundial craft

Okay, here is the thing for how I run crafts with my Sunday School class, it is all about the process, not the product. Craft time is for sitting and talking with the kids getting to know them letting them know I value them and letting them talk through and process the lesson.

That is the entire point of the time. So while I’m going to tell you what I envision this craft ultimately looking like. You can see from the picture of my class doing it up above, that none of their projects turned out how I thought it would look.

• First, color the background of your sundial. This is where I remembered how terrible my somewhat nicer quality paper plate is for projects like this. It’s great to work as a paint palette, but terrible as a craft project because the markers just pill up on top and don’t soak in.
• Then I put the 12 up top, the 6 at the bottom, and the 3 and 9 at the corners so I could more easily put in the other numbers. Now when my Sunday School kids did this they just started stamping those numbers and sticking those stickers on. Hence the random placement of their numbers.
• Next, take your cardstock and cut a triangle. Fold about a half inch of the base of the triangle and then apply glue to the bottom of that and glue it so it is pointing towards the 12. See the picture below for what the cardstock is looking like as you are folding it for the glue. Once you have glued it on, your sundial is all done.

Most of the time in constructing your sundial is in picking out how you will put your numbers on and figuring out just how you are going to decorate your sundial. When I made mine at church, we had “better” paper plates so I was happily coloring mine with circles of color, and adding random shapes on the inside.

It was a nice fun craft the kids had fun with as we talked about the lesson and about how our week was going.

More great Bible crafts to use in Sunday School

Here are a few more great Sunday School crafts to try.

• David and Jonathan craft
• 10 Commandments craft
• 12 spies bookmark craft
• The Lord’s Prayer bracelet craft
• Jesus heals craft