Net Cross - Lent with Kids

This is the third of the children's work activities I'm doing during Lent and Easter. This Sunday was Lent 2 and the gospel reading was Mark 8:31-38 which is all about Jesus' calling of us to be his disciples. 

Jesus is the fisher of men and so he calls us to fish for men.  On the theme of fishing I created an activity on making crosses out of wool to look like nets.  The kids loved the craft and took it even further than I had anticipated; here are the results. 

We started with green and red wool.

One of the kids straight away took one of each colour wool and tied them together and formed this fabulously simple cross

I gave each child a long length of green and shorter pieces of red and showed them how to knot them together as nets are made.  The kids enjoyed knotting the pieces together and "knotting crosses"

The kids enjoyed doing this and wanted to really pull off the full net effect

They then took this net and placed some red wool lengths over the top to make their cross

Some of the younger kids found it hard to knot the wool and so they took a long piece of green and wrapped it around their arms to make a bundle which they then tied together with some red wool. I was really impressed with the effect

So here they are, the three types of crosses which were made

 

I'm sure you'll agree with me that they really capture the way Jesus fished for followers and continues to fish for us after he gave us everything on the cross.  I recommend trying this activity and I'm sure it would work for adults just as well, enjoy.