Long Story Short: The Tower of Babel

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This week we learned about the Tower of Babel.  I was surprised how much we were able to do with this story.  On the first night’s reading in Long Story Short by Marty Machowski, we read through Genesis 10, which contains the geneology of Noah’s sons. You would think that would be boring, but it actually led to a couple interesting discussions, including one about geneologies and ancestors.  We pulled out a family tree that we have on a large scroll, on which my husband’s side is traced back to the 15oo’s.  We talked about how if we knew who was on that “tree” before those ancestors, it would lead all the way back to Noah (most likely through Japheth, if the traditional understanding of the nations is true).  I don’t know if it meant much to the boys, but I was kind of awed by that thought.

Another logical subject to study along with the story of Babel was the idea of languages and nations.  Ian’s always asking what the Spanish words are for various things so he loved this part of our lesson.  I don’t know if Elijah understood the concept or not, but it was a nice introduction for him.  We listened to familiar songs sung in Spanish and samples of other languages.  I also showed the boys video from when I lived in Kenya and worked with Maasai still living traditionally in rural villages.  And we looked at Precious In His Sight, a book with pictures of children from various nations all around the world.

The reading for Day 5 was from Isaiah 1:18 “Come now, let us reason together, says the Lord: though your sins are like scarlet, they shall be as white as snow; though they are red like crimson, they shall become like wool.”  So for Bible time on one of our extra nights, I taught the boys the hymn, “Nothing But the Blood of Jesus.”  (We also read from The Gospel Story Bible one night.)*

Reading Practice

I didn’t do a whole lot of reading practice with Ian this time (we had a crazy busy week!), but here’s what we did read together:

  • The Young Reader’s Bible by Bonnie Bruno (he and I read this one together because he’s not quite ready for it on his own.)
  • Jibber Jabber by Mary Manz Simon
  • Ian practiced reading our memory verse, “God opposes the proud, but gives grace to the humble” James 4:6 using the process I described in this post.

Bible Notebook

Our notebook page this week was simple: just a sheet with our Bible verse on which they build towers using “bricks” of construction paper.  I learned that it worked best to draw a line of glue and have them build a row at a time.  Otherwise we just ended up with floating bricks all over the page.

  

Activities

The boys enjoyed building towers with our stacking blocks (and knocking them down, of course).

  

I also printed out a dot-to-dot (pg.5 of the document) for them to do.  (I put things like this in sheet protectors so they can do them over and over again with dry erase markers.)

Multimedia

Our “Listening Lesson” included several children’s songs the boys already know, only sung in Spanish:

The kids enjoyed the Spanish songs so much I decided to purchase Cantos Biblicos, the Spanish version of a CD of Bible songs we already have in English.  (Actually, I downloaded the MP3 version because I’d collected a few MP3 credits in various ways and had been saving them for something school-related.)  My hope is that not only will the boys have fun learning Bible songs in Spanish, but maybe we can even use them in ministry someday!

*I also considered reading Acts 2:1-12 and discussing the story of Pentecost, but I decided that might be too confusing for preschoolers, though I’d use it with older children.

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