Are You Smarter than a Fifth Grader?

We were given a great opportunity today to be guests in the fifth grade classrooms at Cornerstone Christian Academy in Bloomington, IL. My brother and his wife are both teachers at Cornerstone. My sister-in-law, Abby Huette, is a fifth grade teacher. Every Wednesday morning they have a "Missions Moment" where Abby usually chooses a country from Operation World (a prayer guide for each country of the world). She will inform the students about the country and also about the spiritual needs of the country, then they will take time as a class to pray for that country. This week, she asked if Joe and I could come into the class and give the students a live "Missions Moment." We were able to spend 45 minutes with both fifth grade classrooms and teach them about New Zealand and share with them why we are going. We had so much fun with these students! They were very attentive and were great with participating in the activities that we did with them. We have a quiz that we like to give to students to help them learn things about New Zealand like what language they speak, what the people of New Zealand look like, and other interesting facts about New Zealand. We also told the students how less than 10% of the population is in church on Sunday and showed them what that would look like. We had the 26 students stand in one part of the classroom, all of the students represented the four million people of New Zealand. Then we took less than 10% of those students, 2 students, and had them stand by themselves in another part of the classroom. We talked to the kids about how this represented the amount if people that were not going to church and asked them for ideas to get more people in church. It was a lot of fun for us, and hopefully for the kids too! When we were done, some of the students volunteered to pray for us. Four fifth grade students lifted us up in prayer and it was awesome! They prayer for our health, our ministry, the people of New Zealand, the people that would someday join our church, financial 'precision' (we think he meant provision), and for our friends and family. We were so blessed by the fifth graders today!