Tag Archives: preschool curriculum

A Pair of Red Clogs

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We had a fun week of learning as we rowed A Pair of Red Clogs by Masaka Matsuno.  I chose it because we’ve been reading The Japanese Twins by Lucy Fitch Perkins, which Ian has really enjoyed, though I’ve had some reservations. (See my notes at the end of this post.)*

In keeping with one of the themes in the book, we spent quite a bit of time discussing honesty.  We read The Value of Honesty: The Story of Confucius by Spencer Johnson, as well as a poem called “The Boy Who Never Told a Lie” from The Book of Virtues (p.601) by William J. Bennett.  Our Bible memory verse for the week was Proverbs 12:22.  “Lying lips are an abomination to the Lord, but those who act faithfully are his delight.”

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We discussed several of the lessons in the Five in a Row manual Vol. 1 throughout the week, and for the first time, we attempted the art lesson.  Art has not been one of Ian’s strengths, and I’ve held off on even attempting any of the lessons because he struggled even with basic coloring and drawing.  However, I have intentionally made art instruction a part of our Kindergarten “curriculum” this year, and on the weeks that we include a FIAR book, I want to try to do the art lessons.  The one for A Pair of Red Clogs was pretty simple, and Ian and I were both quite pleased with the way his picture turned out.

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We spent a lot of time this week learning about Japan.  Both boys enjoyed playing a memory matching game using the continent cards  I made from part of the Grandfather’s Journey lapbook on HomeSchoolShare.  (Grandfather’s Journey by Allen Say, also set in Japan, is another book used in FIAR Vol. 1, P1010595but Ian was really resistant to the story for some reason, and I didn’t want to push a book he wasn’t interested in.  He did, however, enjoy reading Tree of Cranes, also by Allen Say.  I made an origami crane and all three kids were fascinated by it.)  The boys also put together our GeoPuzzle of Asia. (I bought the complete set last year when they were on sale at Timberdoodle.com, but it’s the first time we’ve gotten one out.) We watched Big Bird in Japan on YouTube, and then later in the week we watched two episodes of 19 Kids and Counting: Duggars Do Asia.  Both boys really enjoyed watching the Duggars explore Tokyo (available free on iTunes under Volume 8) and Kyoto.  These shows provided a fascinating look at some of the unique aspects of Japanese culture.

They also reminded me of our international coin collection, and P1010569I went digging through the coins to see if I could find some Japanese yen (which I identified with help from Wikipedia).  All three kids LOVE playing with coins, and we were able to look at how the numbers are the same as our numbers whereas the characters are very different from our letters.  I used that as an opportunity to go to a website that translates your name into Japanese katakana characters.  Ian thought it was so interesting, we ended up looking up the names of everyone in our family, our cousins, and the neighbors.

The one thing we didn’t do that I had wanted to was a science activity about making rain that I found on another blog.  Maybe someday we’ll get around to this one, because I think it’s a great way of teaching about the water cycle.  Still, we had a pretty full week, and everyone learned a lot and had fun doing it, so I’d say it was a successful row!

* The Japanese Twins depicts the traditional Japanese view of women and girls.  I was pretty uncomfortable reading the chapter where the father tells the little girl she must obey her baby brother and tells her to bow down while he puts the baby’s foot on her neck to show his authority over her.  It gave us an opportunity for discussion, I suppose, as did the chapter where they went to the temple and worshiped a goddess.  When I started to ask Ian about that one, he pretty much led the discussion.  Having just studied the 10 Commandments, he had a frame of reference, so it wasn’t a big deal.

To see what other FIAR books we’ve rowed, see my “Index of FIAR Posts.”  Also, a great place to see what other people have done with FIAR books is the FIAR Blog Roll at Delightful Learning.

Posted in FIAR, Kindergarten, Literature Units, Preschool

Long Story Short: The Tabernacle

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I was kind of surprised when I realized we were going to spend a whole week on the Tabernacle as we journeyed through the Bible with Long Story Short by Marty Machowski.  However, as we went through the five days of devotions (plus one reading the story in The Gospel Story Bible, also by Machowski) I realized what an important concept it is to understanding the Old Testament.  The Tabernacle was God’s dwelling place among His people, a foreshadowing of Jesus as Immanuel, “God with us.”  Sure, He had interacted with individuals before, and He had shown His power to the people through the plagues in Egypt, the parting of the Red Sea, and His provision for them in the desert, but this was more than that.  This was His actual Presence being with them.  What a powerful thing!  Imagine living in the camp of the Israelites and seeing God’s magnificent tent there in the midst of the thousands of other tents that housed the people, knowing that the almighty Creator of the universe was dwelling there with you.

This week’s devotions probably would have been really hard to get through without the use of visual aids.  If the kids were a little older, I would have been tempted to buy a model of the Tabernacle to put together, but instead I decided to get a Tabernacle felt set for our flannel board.  Unfortunately, one piece was too big for our boards!  So we headed off to the fabric store for some black flannel and made our own big board.  It ended up working out well because we could have two boards out, for both the outer courtyard and the inside of the tabernacle.

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The other resource we used, which I highly recommend, is the Rose Guide to the Tabernacle.  It is not a children’s book, but it is a wonderful resource for personal study, and there are many pictures that are helpful explaining this passage of Scripture to children (or anyone!). We used the felt pieces and/or the Rose Guide every night.  It was so beneficial for the boys to have something tangible to hold and look at as we read through long descriptive passages of the tabernacle and the high priest’s garments that might otherwise have been hard-pressed to hold their attention.

I didn’t have the energy to come up with anything elaborate for the boys’ Bible notebook pages, so I printed up dot-to-dot on a page with our Bible verse.  (Note I did not say memory verse.  We’re not that together yet!  I really want to get back to memorizing Scripture with the boys, but I’m considering going a new route, not connected to our Bible stories, and we’re not up and running.)  However, the week flew by without us ever doing the page.  Will we ever get to it?  I’d give it a 50/50 chance.  I’m trying to let things go and just move on.

Posted in Bible lessons, Long Story Short, Preschool, The Gospel Story

Long Story Short: The 10 Commandments

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We just finished up a great week (plus a few extra days!) on the Ten Commandments.  Even Elijah (3 1/2) worked diligently toward memorizing them, and both boys enjoyed the various activities we did throughout the week in addition to our nightly Bible Time with Long Story Short by Marty Machowski.  We broke out our flannel board set for the first time since our move, and all three kids enjoyed playing with it throughout the week.  I’ve put it on a low table in our schoolroom where they can all reach it, and pretty much every day I caught a glimpse of at least one of them acting out the story with the little felt figures.  (Okay, so Arianna just liked collecting the people and carrying them around, but she’ll get there.)

I really considered buying a 10 Commandments Project Pack from CurrClick, but since I only planned on spending a week on the topic I decided to just stick with activities I could find for free online.  BibleStoryPrintables.com has a lot of fun ideas to print (and in our case laminate so I can reuse them with the younger children).  I pretty much stuck with printables from their site so that the wording would be the same on all our activities.  I used the bookmarks as a reading tool.  They print four on a page, so I printed out one set and laminated them.  Every day at lunch time, each of us got one (even Arianna) and we read through them together.  We worked on memorizing two commandments each day.

I also printed out the sequencing cards and number cards for a matching activity.  (There’s a typo on “adultery,” but I just used a black marker to fix it.) The boys really liked using our pocket chart to have the cards all out in front of them.  We just worked on putting them in order and matching the pictures with the written commandments, but they’d also be great for playing a memory matching game.

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The last thing I printed out was the file folder game.  The game board has typos on “misuse” and “adultery”, but it was pretty simple to fix them by opening the image in Paint, cutting and pasting the letters into the correct places, then copying the corrected image into Word.  (I also found a second game  from The Catholic Toolbox, but I’m saving that one for when my kids are a bit older.)  Next time maybe I’ll plan ahead more and use some of the activities from Oriental Trading Company related to the ten commandments.

After several months’ hiatus, we finally added a page to the boys’ Bible notebooks.  I looked for a new idea, but I just couldn’t find anything I liked as much as the one I did with Ian two years ago (see my post “Train Up a Child (10 Commandments pt.2)“) so we just did it again.  I forgot Elijah’s not a big fan of finger painting, however, so we barely got this one out of him.  He does really like numbers and putting things in order, so after the first day he enjoyed pasting on the commandments.

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Each day we watched one of the episodes from the Kids’ Ten Commandments DVDs.  (There are five episodes, each covering two commandments, so it worked perfectly with our schedule.)  The boys REALLY liked these videos.  They do a wonderful job illustrating each of the commandments through a story about a young Israelite boy living in the desert.  Highly recommended!

Our “Listening Lesson”

Posted in Bible lessons, Long Story Short, Preschool, The Gospel Story

Long Story Short: Moses

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I hesitated to even write this post, since we did very little during our study of Moses from birth through the Exodus outside of reading each night from Long Story Short or The Gospel Story Bible by Marty Machowski.  This season reinforced how much I appreciate the depth of these resources.  Machowski points out both the obvious and more subtle connections of the Old Testament stories to Jesus, and he presents them in such a way that even my boys, only 3 and 5, are able to understand and articulate.

The reason I did decided to go ahead and do a short post about the several weeks we spent on this section of Exodus is that I want to keep a record of the resources I’ve come across.  Because we were caught up in the chaos of packing, moving, and settling in, we pretty much just stuck with picture books and videos to supplement our Bible Time reading every night.  So here are my lists, plain and simple:

Picture Books

Videos

We finally got back to our “Listening Lesson” during Week 33 “God Provides Food and Water for Israel.”  Here’s what was on our playlist:

Posted in Bible lessons, Long Story Short, Preschool, The Gospel Story

Follow the Drinking Gourd

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We stumbled into our latest Five in a Row book completely by accident.  I really wasn’t planning to do any formal schoolwork for a while, but as I started to get boxes unpacked, Ian was drawn to the series of ValueTales books from my childhood library.  He picked out The Value of Helping about Harriet Tubman one night to read with Daddy before bed, so the next day as I was searching for some sort of educational video to put on while I continued tackling boxes, I decided to put on the Reading Rainbow episode on the book Follow the Drinking Gourd by Jeanette Winter.  I figured it was a good time to discuss the concept of slavery and the Underground Railroad since the book on Harriet Tubman had already introduced the idea.  (It also just happened to fit in with our Bible lessons on the Israelites being freed from slavery in Egypt.)

We did several of the lessons from the Five in a Row manual (Vol. 2).  The ones the really stood out were searching for compound words (which took Ian longer than I expected to catch on to, but was really helpful because we started finding them all over the place after that) and learning the song.  Ian enjoyed listening to me sing it as I played it on the piano (so glad the music was in the back of the book!), but I also found a great video of the song on YouTube which shows the lyrics while playing the music.

We talked about gourds and how they can be used to hold liquids.  I have a calabash, or “bottle gourd” that some Maasai friends gave me when I lived in Kenya, and Ian enjoyed having something he could hold and look at, even if it’s shaped a little differently than the drinking gourd referred to in the song (which I would imagine looks more like the picture on the right).

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I found a number of other videos that went along well with this study.  The first was Harriet Tubman from the Animated Hero Classics series (also available on YouTube).  The other was video Follow the Drinking Gourd starring Morgan Freeman, which is available streaming free for Amazon Prime members (anyone can do a 7-day rental for $2.99).  It tells the story of a family escaping via the Underground Railroad.  (For older students, check out Whispers of Angels: A Story of the Underground Railroad, also available streaming free for Amazon Prime members. It’s about an hour long, and it’s a documentary rather than a story, but I really enjoyed it.   Harriet Tubman and the Underground Railroad is another option.  It was a little “dry” for Ian, but short and very informative.)

So it was a pretty simple “row,” but Ian learned a lot, and it felt good to get back into Five in a Row!

To see what other FIAR books we’ve rowed, see my “Index of FIAR Posts.”  Also, a great place to see what other people have done with FIAR books is the FIAR Blog Roll at Delightful Learning.

Posted in FIAR, Literature Units, Preschool

Very Last First Time

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The other day Ian was watching an episode of Reading Rainbow (Keep the Lights Burning, Abbie), and one of the books they recommended at the end was Very Last First Time by Jan Andrews.  He came to me asking if we could get that book, and I told him we already have it since it’s one of our Five in a Row books.  It has been a few weeks since we rowed anything, so it was a great impetus for getting us back into FIAR mode.   I wasn’t familiar with it yet, but it turns out that this is a fascinating book! We pulled out our Five in a Row manual (Vol. 1) and both enjoyed finding out more about the Inuit culture during our week with Very Last First Time.

Ian was puzzled by the airplane in some of the pictures.  “Did they have airplanes in the old days?”  I agreed with him that many parts of the story seemed to indicate it was set a long time ago, but then I pointed out that Eva’s kitchen looks pretty modern.  However, we were a little uncertain as to exactly when to place it because they did use candles for light rather than flashlights (or headlamps, like in the amazing video we watched of real mussel hunters going under the ice).  I wasn’t as concerned about settling on an exact year so much as helping Ian look for clues as to the time period.

P1010214I used this as an opportunity to teach Ian a little about Canada.  After finding the country on our map, we searched for Ungava Bay and talked about what “tundra” means and how the climate is different from where we live because of how far north it is.  We also searched through our collection of foreign coins for any from Canada.

We didn’t spend a whole lot of time on Inuit Culture, but we did get a little taste of it.   It just so happens that we’ve been reading through The Eskimo Twins by Lucy Fitch Perkins as our chapter book read-aloud lately, it was a good fit.  (This link is to a free Kindle version, but we really enjoyed the illustrated version that came in our set of e-books from Yesterday’s Classics.  So many wonderful books are in this bundle!) We watched a video on how to build an igloo, which Ian wanted to share with everyone who came to our house.  P1010286He spent a little time working on this igloo coloring sheet for sight word practice.  I hesitated first about printing it out, and then about giving it to Ian, but it turned out to be a good exercise in following directions and working independently.  He did as much as we wanted and I decided to just leave it at that.  We also read three other picture books that were related to Inuit culture: On Mother’s Lap by Ann Herbert Scott; Mama, Do You Love Me? by Barbara Joosse; and The Three Snow Bears by Jan Brett.

      

I’m not sure what it was that made Ian want to read this book when he saw it introduced on Reading Rainbow, but I was glad that we had it on hand so we could pull it out when he asked for it.  I first discovered Five in a Row when he was not quite two years old.  Right away I knew it was something I wanted to do, so I started collecting the books from Before Five in a Row and all four volumes when I’d see them at used book stores and on PaperBack Swap.  By the time Ian was old enough, I’d gathered probably ninety percent of the stories.  It’s wonderful being able to just grab one that interests us and dive in!

To see what other FIAR books we’ve rowed, see my “Index of FIAR Posts.”  Also, a great place to see what other people have done with FIAR books is the FIAR Blog Roll at Delightful Learning.

Posted in FIAR, Literature Units, Preschool

Long Story Short: summary of our weeks on Joseph

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Contrary to what my recent blogging record implies, we’ve been plugging away at our Bible lessons as usual.  I continue to be so thankful for Marty Machowski’s Long Story Short.  During a season of minimal schooling, I am confident our children are still getting a steady diet of Bible knowledge thanks to the thoughtful devotions in this book.  I haven’t been doing a lot of extras, just our nightly devotions and a “listening lesson” for during the day, which we primarily use as we drive around town.  Even so, as we’ve gone through the last few weeks on the story of Joseph’s life, both boys have learned a lot, and Ian especially has it firmly engraved upon his heart.

The more we read about Joseph, the more in awe I am of how God works in our lives.  It really is an incredible story.  God took something horrible (broken family relationships, near murder, selling a brother into slavery and deceiving their father) and used it to save countless lives during the famine that came years later.  And one of the pivotal events of the Bible, the Exodus, wouldn’t have happened Joseph (and later his family) hadn’t gone down to Egypt.

The story lends itself to so many discussions, and we often used our extra night (the book includes 5 devotions each week, plus we do one night in The Gospel Story Bible, also by Machowski) to read through what the Bible said about pride, trust, forgiveness, etc.  I used Parenting With Scripture to easily look up verses on each topic, but a Child Training Bible would also be a good tool.  (I just didn’t want to take the time to flip through all the verses to pick out which ones to read with the boys, so Parenting With Scripture was handy because the verses were all laid out on one page.)

Go-Along Books The story of Joseph is found in most children’s Bible storybooks.  We read it in several over the weeks we spent on the story, but I also really liked this book: Joseph by Brian Wildsmith.  It is a thorough retelling of the story, accompanied by beautiful illustrations.  Ian especially liked the hieroglyphics (thank you, Little Einsteins, for introducing them!)

Bible Notebook I have to admit, we haven’t been working on a memory verse, but we did talk about Romans 8:28 so I put it on our Bible notebook page so the boys could review it whenever they look through their books.  For the craft, I considered repeating what we did the last time Ian and I talked about Joseph, but I didn’t want both his notebook pages to be the same.  Instead I just had them color on coffee filters and then use an eyedropper of water to help the colors spread out.  We cut out two wedges for the arms and then bunched the rest up for the coat and glued them on top of people we drew.  Ian thinks they look like dresses.  I have to agree.   At least they’re colorful!

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Multimedia

We watched several related videos over the course of our study:

  • Joseph: King of Dreams DreamWorks took a few liberties with the story (mostly about the timing of Rachel’s death, how long Joseph was in prison, etc.), but overall our whole family enjoyed watching this together and comparing it to the biblical account.
  • Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat While the cover of the DVD touts it as the “classic family musical,” THIS IS ONE TO KEEP THE REMOTE HANDY ON!  We completely skipped the scene with Potiphar’s wife because the costumes were so inappropriate.  There were a few other scenes that had some questionable costuming as well but I let them pass because it wasn’t as obvious and Ian didn’t seem to notice.  It’s really too bad, because the music itself is very family friendly (with the exception of Potiphar’s wife saying, “Come and lie with me, love,” but since that’s pretty much what the Bible records, I’m not going to complain).
  • Veggie Tales: The Ballad of Little Joe Ian has seen this one before, but I don’t think he’d ever realized it’s (loosely!) based on the story of Joseph.  This time he definitely caught the similarities.

I had so many things to use in our “Listening Lessons” to go with Joseph.  I broke it down and tried to only use the ones that specifically applied to the part of the story we were focused on each week.  Here’s a summary of all the things we listened to:

Ian and I closed out our time on Joseph by going to a live theater performance of Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat (one we had been assured was appropriate for kids).  It’s a fast-paced show, so it kept his attention the whole time.  We really enjoyed our special “date” together! Oh well.

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Posted in Bible lessons, Long Story Short, Preschool, The Gospel Story

Lentil

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I can’t believe I’ve been hanging on to this post for almost 2 months and never managed to finish it.  We’re in a crazy season right now.  I’m almost out of my first trimester, so I’ve been feeling rather sub-par for a while.  We’re also in escrow and getting ready to move into a new house.  We haven’t stopped doing school, but it’s definitely thinned out a bit.  Any Five in a Row books we’ve picked up have been done strictly “by the manual,” so I didn’t see much point in writing about them.  We’ve kept up Bible and composer study, but that’s been about it.  I’m hoping after we move I’ll be able to get in a few good months before the baby arrives in September (by which time Ian will “officially” be a Kindergartener!)

Anyway… just for my records, here’s what we did when we rowed Lentil by Robert McCloskey (way back when…)

We did several lessons out of the manual.  Ian especially enjoyed the lesson on the patriotism and the flag. We talked about the number of stars and stripes, and I showed Ian this map of the original 13 colonies and we compared it to a map of the 5o states.  We tried counting all the flags we could find in the book (37 including small banners people were holding that we couldn’t exactly tell if they were flags or not).

We couldn’t help singing “She’ll Be Coming’ Round the Mountain” a few times, but Ian’s favorite part of this book was playing the harmonica.  I had an old one around and our neighbor just happened to stop by and give one to the boys as well, so everyone had fun making music all week.  (And I’ve conveniently misplaced them and don’t know where they are now!)

To see what other FIAR books we’ve rowed, see my “Index of FIAR Posts.”  Also, a great place to see what other people have done with FIAR books is the FIAR Blog Roll at Delightful Learning.

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Posted in FIAR, Literature Units, Preschool

Long Story Short: Jacob and Esau/Jacob’s Lie

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Over the last couple weeks, our devotions in Long Story Short by Marty Machowski have been about Jacob and Esau.  These are some of those stories where the Bible just tells us what happened without passing judgment on the main characters, which leaves us with a bit of explaining to do when it comes to teaching our children.  The stories are found in Genesis 25 and 27, and in them you’ll find multiple instances of lying, parents playing favorites with their children, and a mother encouraging her child to deceive his father at the expense of another child.  What do we make of all this? I think the answer comes in the chapters still ahead of us.  Jacob was the one through whom God would keep His promise of a Savior, but he wasn’t chosen because of his own righteousness..  Jacob may have been deceitful in this story, but as he gets older, God works in his life and changes him (though he too plays favorites with his children, and that brings plenty of drama of its own).

Since there are only five devotions for each week in Long Story Short, we spent one of our extra nights reading the story in The Gospel Story Bible (also by Machowski) and the other going through Bible verses about honesty (which Eric looked up easily in Parenting With Scripture by Kara Durbin–see my review from last year).

Go-Along Books

We spent a lot of time focusing on how not to follow Jacob and Esau’s example.  Two books I love are We’re Very Good Friends, My Brother and I  and Brothers Forever by P.K. Hallinan.  They’re very similar, so I wouldn’t recommend getting both, but I think every family with two or more boys should read at least one of these.  (I think the first one is my favorite.  I actually bought a second copy after our first got a bit of damage because it’s one I really want to keep around.)  Reading these led to some good discussions on how brothers should treat each other, which then led to a discussion of our memory verse (the “Golden Rule”): “Do to others as you would have them do to you.” Matthew 7:12.

Bible Notebook

For our notebook page on this story, I adapted this idea for making a painting/print of the twins.  Then instead of coloring the men, we just glued hair onto Esau (which we had saved from the boys’ haircuts the night before).  It was messy(!) but the boys really got a kick out of using their own hair.

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Activities

I was surprised by how many activities flowed naturally out of these stories.

The first week (Genesis 25:19-34) we compared the descriptions of Jacob and Esau (physical appearance, occupations, personalities, etc.), looked at the difference between Daddy’s “hairy” arm and Mommy’s “smooth” one, and fixed lentils to go with dinner like the stew Jacob traded for Esau’s birthright.

The second week (Genesis 27) we talked about the “5 Senses” and looked for the part each played in the story.

  • Sight (Isaac’s eyes are “dim” and he can’t see well enough to know who’s who.)
  • Hearing (Isaac remarks that “the voice is Jacob’s,” which confuses him because of what his other senses tell him.)
  • Taste (Rebekah prepares goat meat with special spices so it will taste like Esau’s hunting catch.)
  • Smell (Jacob wears Esau’s robe, which leads Isaac to comment, “See, the smell of my son is as the smell of a field that the Lord has blessed.”
  • Touch (Rebekah covers the smooth skin of Jacob’s hands and neck with the goatskin so he will feel hairy like Esau.)

In addition to discussion, here are some of the 5 senses activities I found: trace and color pages at Making Learning Fun, a mini-book at Kidzone, page at Homeschool Share.

There are some activity pages at DLTK-Bible related to the story as well.

We also used spent time in prayer during Bible time blessing each child.

Multimedia

Both boys enjoyed reading/listening to The Berenstain Bears and the Golden Rule Kindle edition (also available in paperback).

Our “Listening Lesson” was a big hit this week (though I’m not sure why).  Ian requested it at least once a day:

Posted in Bible lessons, Long Story Short, Preschool, The Gospel Story

Long Story Short: God Provides a Wife for Isaac

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Last week we jumped back into our Bible lessons with the Long Story Short devotional by Marty Machowski.   I am amazed at what our boys have learned since we started going through this book in August.  Even though it sometimes seems like Elijah’s not quite old enough to listen and participate, when questioned, we discover he’s absorbed an incredible amount.

This week we read the story of Isaac and Rebekah in Genesis 24.  It’s a beautiful story of God moving to work out all the details in response to prayer.  Abraham gave his servant a challenging assignment in sending him far away to find a girl willing to come back to Canaan, but the servant went to God asking for His help in finding a wife for Isaac, and “before he had finished speaking” (verse 15), along came Rebekah, who quickly fulfilled the sign for which the servant had asked.  Throw in the fact the she is “very attractive” (verse 16), and that Isaac loves her pretty much immediately, and you’ve got a romantic story worthy of a chick flick.

Extra Activities

In addition to our nightly devotions, we found a lot of extended learning opportunities:

Camels

Abraham’s servant took ten camels along with him on his journey (verse 10).  Elijah enjoyed singing about them to the tune of “10 Little Indians.”  We enjoyed learning about camels  from a 99-cent Kindle Book 14 Fun Facts About Camels as well as from a lapbook at HomeSchoolShare .  (We didn’t do the lapbook, just enjoyed some of the information in it.)

Wells

The whole concept of a well is pretty foreign to these modern American boys.  I found this Thirstin’s Water Cycle Adventure page from the EPA site really helpful for explaining what a well is and talking about the water cycle.  (I also liked this water cycle website.)

Marriage

The Person I Marry: Things I'll Think About Long Before Saying "I Do" (Bright Future Books)We discussed marriage in our culture versus arranged marriages.  I don’t remember how it came up, but I had a great opportunity to talk about how love is a choice we make about how to treat the other person, regardless of our feelings.  We also talked about how Abraham sent the servant far away to find the right girl because the women in Canaan worshipped other gods, and importance of marrying someone who knows God.  Marriage may seem like an odd topic to talk about with preschool boys, but I want to plant seeds so they will be able to make wise choices, and this Bible story provided a logical connection. I really like the book The Person I Marry by Gary Bower.  One day at lunchtime I read it to the boys and we talked about some of the pages.

Bible Notebook

100_8609Our Bible notebook page wasn’t necessarily about Isaac and Rebekah, but focused on how Isaac (and his family) trusted in God to provide the right wife.  For our Bible verse, I used Proverbs 3:5-6 (“Trust in the Lord with all your heart, and do not lean on your own understanding.  In all your ways acknowledge him, and he will make straight your paths.”)  I found a free clipart image of a childlike bride and groom and put white circles over the faces.  Then I printed out pictures of the boys faces and question marks for them to paste on the circles.

Our “Listening Lesson”

Here’s what was playing on our iPod as we drove around town:

Posted in Bible lessons, Long Story Short, Preschool, The Gospel Story
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