I Stand All Amazed

"I Stand All Amazed" pg 193, is a pretty difficult song to teach the younger children, lots of big words and hard concepts.  So I used pretty standard visual drawings and pictures for the first verse and then did more focus on the chorus, which has a lot of great material in it and some repetition which always helps.  I worked a lot with the junior primary on this so they could at least join in strong with the chorus. 

First, I talked about the word "Wonderful" and we talked about why something so terrible as Jesus dying was actually a wonderful thing for us.  This helped them understand the two seemingly different ideas of death and wonderful.  Then I had them listen to me say the word a couple of times and then I had them clap out the three syllables, with a little longer on the first syllable.  We practiced the rhythm over and over, and then whenever we sang the word wonderful, they clapped the rhythm along with singing.

Also, I had the kids make an "O" with their hands and they did this each time we sang "Oh it is Wonderful..."  They really paid attention and sang well, waiting for their chance to lift up their Os and also clap the word Wonderful.

Simple ideas, but effective for the younger children especially.

*Eventually, if I have time, for the senior primary I'm going to copy the song from the book itself and give them each a copy and we are going to go through the song a bit and talk about some of the words, maybe dynamics or other notations.  If there is time I'll let them use colored pencils to make notes on the music itself, to help them sing the song with more feeling and thought.