Subjects Not To Discuss Until Age 7

While I am home for the Summer I have been asked to help with the primary kids at church. My initial reaction was excitement because my memories of being in Primary were all of treats and singing and games...much more exciting than sitting around with women twice my age in Relief Society. (For last week's lesson the teacher put up a big quote on the board which said something about remaining faithful lest we be 'cast down to Hell'. Uplifting yes? But it got better, one woman told a story about evil spirits sitting in the back seat of her car, I kid you not. Now I'm not denying the existence of evil spirits/negative karma/bad juju or whatever, but it was a little awkward.)

Anyway, I had my first Primary assignment yesterday, teaching the 4 year-olds. The lesson title was I am Grateful for Food & Clothing but could have been more accurately titled Subjects Not To Discuss Until Age 7. The first problem was that this food lesson fell on Fast Sunday, so talking about food at 3:30pm when I had been without since the night before put me off my game a little. Second, the lesson manual focused on teaching about where food and clothing comes from (animals and plants). I thought this would be pretty easy, I brought some examples of various foods (carrots, cheese, bread, etc. - edible object lessons to keep their minds and mouths occupied), and we talked about where each came from. Then I asked the three kids what their favorite foods were, the first kid, Van, yelled, "Chicken Nuggets!"

In response to his outburst, I continued the theme of discussing where food comes from, I asked them if they knew where Chicken Nuggets came from, they said no. Well they actually stared blankly back at me, which I took to mean no, so I explained that they came from chickens. This turned out not to be such a good idea. The follow-up question, which I should have seen coming, was, "How? From the eggs?" "No," I explained, "From the meat of the chicken." "Where's the meat?" Van was staring up at me, honest curiosity radiating from his large brown eyes, a very rare occurence in my experiences with this hyper-active child. Then I was trapped, was it really my job to communicate the brutality involved with the creation, or rather compilation of Chicken Nuggets to an innocent 4 year-old? How could I show this kid's favorite food for the disgusting amalgamation of leftover parts that it really is when he was staring up at me like that? I didn't think this dilemma was one that I, a 20 year-old subsitute teacher with no children of my own, should have to deal with. But I also couldn't lie in reponse to such an honest query, so I brushed it off by saying, "The meat is all over the chicken. Who wants to play a game?". I silently congratulated myself on the stealthy avoidance of a serious issue. But then, the game I had thought up went awry.

I had the kids point to different items of clothing and then explained where the materials of each came from. (I'm no expert on that subject, so my answers were basically restricted to cotton or sheep's wool, I'm fairly sure that did not cover every item they pointed to but I was not about to explain where one child's leather belt came from!)

However, I did make the mistake of asking the question, "Why do we need clothes?" Clearly, I should have known from my experiences with four brothers, that this question would inevitably lead to a comment about nakedness, apparently one of the most hilarious words on earth to 4 year-olds. I should have avoided asking the question for that reason alone, I could not however, have predicted the unfortunate response given, again from Van. He started with the simple statement, "So we don't have to run around naked in the house," but then it got uncomfortable, "Sometimes me and my dad run around naked when my mom's not home." While the other two students laughed uproariously at the word 'naked', I had an unfortunate image run through my mind of Van and his dad, who I know a little bit and who had in fact, been sitting in front of us in Sacrament Meeting that morning, strpping the second his wife left the house and running around in some sort of strange, male-ritualistic free-for-all. (I thought it would be inappropriate to post a picture of the image I had in my head, but I thought this summed it up pretty well.)

There was no recovering, at that point I just resorted to crowd-control tactics for small children, I pulled out the markers and paper and we colored for the last ten minutes. Thankfully, they were so excited about the candy bar they each got to help them remember to be grateful for food, that they forgot about the 'naked' discussion and kept their drawings to a series of unfathomable scribbles that they claimed were innocent items like strawberries and batman pajamas.