His Treasure Seekers

This week we learned about David during his time as a shepherd.  I had two main purposes in chosing to do this lesson.  First of all, there is so much shepherd imagery in the Bible, and this seemed like a good way to introduce such a foreign idea to a 21st century American child.  Also, I wanted to spend a few weeks talking about David, and this seemed like a logical place to start.  For the record, I’m straying from our ABC Jesus Loves Me curriculum (which seems a bit ironic since I finished the last post praising it!)  I had a couple reasons for going this route.  For one thing, I noticed the ABCJLM 3-year old curriculum only had two more lessons with stories from the Old Testament (David and Goliath and then Daniel in the lion’s den).  There are so many other stories I wanted to touch on.  I thought about just sticking with the curriculum since we’ll hit all those at some point in the future, but my other issue was that we started this “year” back in March, which means our holidays aren’t lined up (since the curriculum is designed to start in August).  I didn’t want to run into the same issue next year, so I decided I’d rather stretch out this fall with more OT stories.  We should be ready for Baby Jesus to arrive right around Christmas.  (Of course, since our own baby will be arriving only a few weeks earlier, the chances of us doing much as far as lessons any time around there are pretty slim.  But we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it!)  Anyway…

Our first stop, as always, was the flannel board set.  Elijah is usually just an onlooker during this time, but after seeing me go through the story with Ian on Monday, he decided he wanted in on the fun.  Several times through the week he went to the table where it was set up and asked me to tell the story.  Of course, then Ian always wanted to join us, so we got in lots of repetition this week.

Elijah was SO proud of himself.  The boys both had a great time pretending to be the bear (Elijah) and the lion (Ian) that tried to attack David’s sheep.  (The lion got a little carried away and decided to chase Grandpa down the stairs.)

Because there wasn’t really a story to go along with David being a shepherd, we didn’t have a lot of choices of things to read.  I chose two passages out of The Bible in Pictures for Little Eyes, one on David taking care of his sheep by killing the lion, and one on David writing songs to sing to God.  For memory work, I started working on Psalm 23 with Ian.  I don’t know how much he’ll be able to get, but I’m hoping to help him memorize the whole thing over the next 4 weeks we spend learning about David’s life.  We made it through the first part of verse 3 this week, which is a lot longer than our normal memory verse, so I think we just might make it.

My main concern with branching out from the ABCJLM curriculum is figuring out what to do for our Bible Notebook each week.  I usually get inspired from the great links included with each lesson.  This week’s story was pretty easy though.  This sheep craft wasn’t quite as 2-dimensional as I like to be for our notebook, but I knew the cotton balls would be a hit.  (We made an extra for Ian to play with and display in the kitchen along with Elijah’s.)  And as a bonus, he got a little scissors practice in with the grass.

I had some trouble deciding on what to put in our iPod playlist.  There were many different translations of Psalm 23 incorporated in to the songs I had.  (I decided to use the English Standard Version for our memorization.)  Ian noticed right away when one of the songs used “I shall not be in want” rather than “I shall not want” as I had taught him.  But I just told him they meant the same thing and he left it at that.  Here’s what we listened to this week:

• “The Lord is my Shepherd” from 100 Ways to Know God Loves me & 100 Songs to Love Him Back
• “The Lord is my Shepherd” (classic Bible song I had a a few different CDs)
• “Psalm 23” from the ESV Audio Drama Children’s Bible from Faith Comes By Hearing (I also included the song, “My Sheep”)
• “Psalm 23” from The Singing Bible
• “Psalm 23” from the Sing the Word: A New Commandment CD by the Harrow Family
• Karen & Kids podcast: “Sheep” (see this post to find out more about how we love Karen & Kids)
• “The Lord is My Shepherd” from John Rutter’s Requiem (a little different from our normal fare, but I couldn’t pass up the chance to expose my kids to beautiful choral music!)