Okay, so I’m enjoying my baby class very much. The kids are so sweet. I enjoy having their moms and grandmoms helping out. It’s just fun to teach babies. But, alas, it’s not to be. We had a shortage of teachers this quarter and I was asked to move back to the elementary class. Now I don’t have anything against these sweet kids — I’ve even got one of my own in there — but I really was enjoying teaching the baby class. After a complete change of time period, learning abilities, etc, I am ready for my new venture.

This quarter we will be studying Joshua and Judges. Now if you’re going to have to teach a an elementary class, what better one could there be than Joshua and Judges. Tomorrow’s lesson is about crossing the Jordan river.

Lesson Plan:

Pass out activity sheet to color. I need to do this first thing (begin as children come to class) because we’re going to be gluing on it and it HAS to dry before we can finish it. The activities came from Standard’s Color and Tell Coloring Book. It is a small booklet that I have added some embellishment to. I hope to have pictures and a pdf to share after class. (Added 3/17/11: pictures and pdf for activity, scroll on down).

Review Bible Story — especially about the parting of the Red Sea.

Sing: Dare To Stand Like Joshua

Read lesson from the Bible (Joshua 3 and 4). Discuss the lesson.

Discuss what a memorial is. Compare what the altar of stones meant to Israelites and what the Lord’s Supper means to us.

Hopefully glue will be somewhat dry so we can add the rest of the pieces to the take home activity.

Conclude class with songs of their choice, review books of the Old Testament, prayer.

Here are some pictures of the activity we did. They are sort of blurry. My camera has been acting up lately but I think you can get the idea. This activity came from a book published by Standard called Bible Stories to Color and Tell. I don’t remember if this one came out of the 3-6 year old book or the 6-8 year old book. They are both good books to have in your resource room.

The activity they had was basically a color sheet with 3 pictures depicting the story of the crossing of the Jordan River. You then fold them to make a little booklet. That’s nice but I like a little more than coloring for an activity. I manipulated the original activity sheet on Paint Shop Pro and made it a little more interactive. Before class I had the priests/ark picture colored, and cut out for each child. I also had the stones cut out. You’ll need 12 stones for each child so do the math. When it came time to use them, I just laid them out on the table and let them choose their own stones. The kids colored their pages as they came into class. They then put glue on the squiggly lines in the water to give it some texture. We let this dry while we went on with class. After the lesson, they glued the priests/ark picture in it’s proper place and made their memorial out of 12 stones.

Here is the pdf for the activity: Crossing Jordan

The first page is the original as it came out of the book mentioned above. The second page is the color sheet without the memorial or the priests/ark. The third page is the altar (I prefer using individual stones but an already stacked memorial will work as well) and the priests/ark.