The Holy Spirit (Pentecost)
We’re almost through the ABC Jesus Loves Me 3-Year Old Curriculum, but I wasn’t ready to end our Bible lessons with Jesus returning to heaven, so for the next few weeks we’ll be on our own as we finish up the New Testament. This week we talked about the disciples receiving the gift of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost. It’s a hard story for me as an adult to fully wrap my mind around, so my goal was just to present the whole event as told in Scripture, touch on some basic concepts, and then let it go. Sometimes I’m content with just laying a foundation for future learning. Here were the concepts I wanted Ian to understand:
- Jesus sent the Holy Spirit to His followers.
- If we follow Jesus, the Holy Spirit lives in our hearts and helps us become more like Christ.
- The Holy Spirit helped the disciples speak other languages so everyone could hear the good news about Jesus.
For our memory verse, I chose Romans 5:5, which we sang to the tune of “Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star”:
“God’s love has been poured into our hearts, through the Holy Spi-rit. Romans chapter 5, verse 5; Romans chapter 5, verse 5. God’s love has been poured into our hearts, through the Holy Spi-rit.”
Most of my teaching centered around listening to our iPod playlist and having LOTS of discussions. Here’s what was playing this week:
- “Acts” from The Singing Bible“
- “Acts 2” from the ESV Audio Drama from Faith Comes By Hearing
- “Make Your Home in My Heart” from I Want to Be Like Jesus from Vineyard Music (an older CD, but one of my favorites)
- “Create in Me a Clean Heart” from Scripture Rock Vol. 2
- “He Reigns” from Fruit Of The Spirit: Apple-Icious (begins with children reciting from the Psalms in various languages)
- Karen & Kids podcast episodes “Life in the Spirit” and “Languages” (this story is also told in “Peter” but we’re saving that for next week)
We talked about what languages are and I shared little bits of French, German, Italian, Spanish, and Swahili with Ian. (I SO wish I were fluent in another language, but unfortunately I just know a few basics in lots of languages. Helpful for finding my way around in foreign countires, but it doesn’t exactly help me really communicate!) He was really fascinated by the whole concept. He’s heard people speaking Spanish and Korean, but I don’t think it really clicked with him what was going on until this week.
I’ve kind of slacked on our Bible Notebook with the last few lessons. I hope to do a few more pages this year, but then I’ll have to rethink the whole thing. I don’t like being so inconsistent, but neither do I want to let myself get so caught up in “producing” something tangible that our lessons suffer.