And the walls came tumbling down!
I finally managed to be intentional about including Before Five in a Row in our week’s plan, and the book I’d scheduled months ago just happened to be the book of the week in ABC Jesus Loves Me Week 11 lesson plan. So Monday was all about Goodnight Moon (see my post about our week with GM here). On Tuesday I introduced our Bible story for the week: the Battle of Jericho!
As usual, the first thing we did was tell the story with our flannel board set.
Ian was curious about the picture of the covered ark. I explained what it was and told him they were carrying it on poles because it was so special/holy no one was supposed to touch it. Of course a minute later he took one of the men who had his hand raised and made him “touch” the ark. I told him the story of Uzzah from 2 Samuel 6:6-7, who died after disobeying God by touching the ark. He liked the way I took the man and threw him on down on the table to show he was “dead”, so of course then he just wanted to make men touch the ark and die. I think he understood the story since we also read it in the old version of The Beginner’s Bible (see this post for more about the Bible story books I like), but I decided we should stop Bible time before that was all he got out of it.
The flannelboard pieces only depicted the story from in the distance, which missed all the excitement. So on Thursday we built a “city” wall and marched around it seven times, trying really hard to refrain from blowing our trumpet until the last time. Then we put on “Be Strong” from Scripture Rock Vol. 2 (I decided to use “Be strong and courageous” Joshua 1:9 as our memory verse this week.)
Unfortunately, our walls didn’t fall down with a mighty shout. Thankfully, Ian was more than willing to help with that part of the story. He enjoyed it so much we had to rebuild the walls and do it again, this time with Elijah joining in the destructive fun! And long after the blocks were cleaned up and the trumpet put away, he kept asking to do it again. Glad it was a hit!
I had trouble finding a ready-made activity for our Bible notebook. Everything seemed to be either just a coloring page or else something 3-D which obviously woudn’t suit our purposes. So I made one up. I have lots of color strips from trimming construction paper down to notebook size, so I chopped those into “bricks,” which Ian then glued onto the wall I had sketched onto his paper.
I searched Google images for pictures of the battle of Jericho, found a couple I liked, and printed them out. Then I cut the figures out and we glued them in front of our “wall.” I wish I’d shrunk them a bit, but oh well. Ian liked them. (And again, he kept trying to make someone touch the ark so the would die. Oh dear.)
We watched two videos related to our story: Veggie Tales: Josh and the Big Wall (available streaming on Netflix) and Greatest Heroes and Legends of the Bible: Joshua and the Battle of Jericho. He also really enjoyed listening to our iPod playlist this week:
- “Be Strong” from Scripture Rock Vol. 2
- “Joshua Fought the Battle of Jericho” from the 50 Bible Songs CD I found at the 99-cent Store
- “March around Jericho” from The Singing Bible
- “Joshua 6: The Battle of Jericho” from the ESV Audio Drama Children’s Bible from Faith Comes By Hearing (also includes a song, “Be Strong”)
- “Siege at Jericho” from Adventures in Odyssey #22 (Changing Times)
He kept asking me to put on the “Jericho song” so he could march around with his trumpet. I’m just glad he got something out of the story this week besides killing off men who touched the ark!