The Twelve Apostles Lesson

My first grade CCD(religious education) class was learning about the twelve apostles today in class.  Yes, I still call it CCD. Old habits are hard to get rid of.

While they were waiting for the kids to arrive, they worked on coloring a picture of Jesus talking to Andrew and Peter.

Andrew and Peter were the first two apostles to follow Jesus.

Peter is an important apostle to learn, since he was the first pope of the Catholic church.

I found a kid friendly page here. It could be printed with or without bible verses.

I found some more coloring pages of the twelve apostles at the following sites.

Bible Kids

More from Bible Kids

This coloring page has a place where the kids can fill in the apostles names.

Bible Printables has a nice page here.

To start off class, I read a story called The Story of Jesus and his His Disciples. It's part of a book collection called An Alice in Bibleland Storybook. We were given these books from a sweet older lady. She had bought them for her grandson many years ago and since he was in his early 20's they no longer needed them.

We learned a new song that is sung to the tune "Jesus Loves Me"

Jesus called them one by one,

Peter, Andrew, James, and John

Next came Philip, Thomas too

Matthew and Bartholomew

Yes, Jesus called them,

Yes, Jesus called them,

Yes, Jesus called them,

He called them one by one.

James, the one they called the less,

Simon also Thaddeus

Twelve apostles Judas made

Jesus was betrayed by him.

Yes, Jesus called them,

Yes, Jesus called them,

Yes, Jesus called them,

Yes, Jesus called them, He called them one by one

We divided up into teams and played the apostle fishing game I made.

Each team took turns fishing for one of the apostles. The first team to collect all twelve apostles won the game. It was easy at first, but once there were fewer fish (some with duplicate names) left the kids had to really pay attention to the names they were drawing. Paying close attention to the fish the other team fished out but already had came in handy! It always amazes me that only a few of the kids pick up on that strategy. You can find the game here in a previous post I made.

We talked about why Jesus chose his apostles., what type of qualities he would look for in a follower, and whether or not it would have been easy to be a follower of Jesus.

After our discussion, we played follow the leader. We made some things easy and some things hard just like life would have been for Jesus' Apostles. The kids messed up and got tired which led into a wonderful conversation about how the apostles would have handled mistakes. We talked about how the apostles were just men. Human like us. They made mistakes just like we do, but Jesus never gives up on us. He is always with us and guiding us through out our lives.

I then asked the kids how we could be apostles of Jesus in today's world.

Here are some of their answers.....

helping others

being nice to others

making friends with a new person

not picking on others

obeying our parents

giving someone the gift of a Bible

telling others about God and Jesus

sharing our food with those who don't have enough

sharing with our brothers and sisters

I thought they came up with some wonderful ways to be disciples of Jesus.

All it takes is small steps.

“Miss no single opportunity of making some small sacrifice, here by a smiling look, there by a kindly word; always doing the smallest right and doing it all for love.”
― Thérèse de Lisieux

For homework, I sent home a maze for the kids to do. They have to help the apostles get to Jesus.

I found it here.

Some other worksheets

A Kids Heart word scramble 

An online game to find the name of the twelve apostles

A printable page of find the name of the apostles

DLTK Bible

 word mining page

crossword puzzle