About a month ago, I was called to teach the CTR-6 class in our new ward. I laughed pretty hard…I taught the CTR-6’s in the La Verne 2nd and Balmoral Wards…and those callings were the ones I left the wards with. I was getting the RS teacher vibe…so I was surprised to get called to this one again. My callings seem to come three times, activities committee chair x 3, nursery leader x 3, and CTR-6 x 3. I’ve only taught gospel doctrine once, so will I have that calling two more times?

I decided to go all out for my new kids…spiffy name tags, lots of visual aids, and my favorite thing from my primary years….salt dough! Sharing time hour went well…the six 5-6 year old kids were about as squirmy as you’d expect. They sang the songs and peeked over at me to see if I was singing too. But during the classtime hour, they were so wound up to have a new teacher that I could barely control them. I told them about me, asked questions to get-to-know them, and made up the nametags. The lesson was “Jesus Christ was once a little child,” and they loved the game I started out the lesson with. But as I went along the lesson manual…they were getting more an more anxious to know what the squishy lump in the Tupperware was.

The kids voices and squeals crescendoed over the next 15 minutes, till I finally dropped the lesson and went into my “Let’s make clay pots like Jesus used” activity. I had Taylor make the dough from the recipe in the primary manual. Unfortunately, it was overly sticky and messier than normal. The kids were slathering it up their arms, poking each other’s faces with goo, and were the total opposite of “reverent.” I let them play until about 5 minutes till the block was over, and we shipped off to the restroom to get cleaned up. The little girls squeals were so amplified by the restroom acoustics that the primary president ran into the restroom to scold me within about 30 seconds. What a way to make an impression for my first week teaching!

Needless to say, beware the salt dough recipe….