His Treasure Seekers

I had never heard of the book If Jesus Came to My House by Joan G. Thomas until we started Before Five in a Row, but it’s become a favorite of mine.  It seemed like a fitting choice to go along with our Bible story this week, since Jesus really did go to Zacchaeus’ house.  We didn’t do a lot of activities, but the book did trigger a lot of good conversations.

We talked about shadows and enjoyed listening to a poem, “My Shadow,” from A Child’s Garden of Verses by Robert Louis Stevenson. We also discussed how the dark can be scary sometimes, which led to talking about Ian’s favorite Scripture song: “When I am Afraid” from Hide ’em in Your Heart Vol. 1 by Steve Green. The Before Five in a Row manual had another song suggestion, but I also used this discussion as an opportunity to introduce Ian to Rodgers and Hammerstein with “I Whistle a Happy Tune” from The King and I.  I put all three of these on our iPod playlist, along with other things related to our Bible story.  (The full playlist is in my post on our week with Zacchaeus.)

I love the part of the story where the little boy lets Jesus play with his nicest toys, and even lets him pick the best to take with him when he leaves.  I asked Ian which of his toys he thought was the nicest.  He decided it was his monster truck.  “If Jesus came to visit, would you let him play with your monster truck?”  I’m not sure he was quite ready to answer that question.  He definitely seemed torn!

I put some pages from Homeschool Creations in Ian’s workbook, which he always enjoys.  I also created and laminated some cards with rhyming pairs from the story.  Ian has gotten much better with rhymes than he was when we first started talking about them (about a year ago), but sometimes he still comes up with the craziest answers when I ask him, “What word rhymes with [blank]?” It makes me wonder: does he really not understand the whole concept or is he just being silly? I figure it never hurts to have a little more practice.

This story didn’t “click” with Ian as much as some of the others we’ve done, but I love it because it’s so sweet.  I’m looking forward to re-rowing it with Elijah and Arianna down the road!