The Gibeonites

A tricky story this week: Joshua 9 (the Gibeonite deception).  God tells the Israelites that they have to kill all the surrounding tribes (so that they don't end up following their gods).  The Gibeonites realise they're going to be killed, and dress in old clothes to fool the Israelites into making a peace treaty with them ("we're from really far away - look how worn out our clothes are from the journey!").  The Israelites don't ask God what they should do, make the treaty, then have to side with the Gibeonites in an epic battle against some other neighbours, where the sun stands still for long enough for them to finish the battle.

Many of the internet resources seemed to boil down to "God said to kill them; they didn't listen to God; the Israelites did the wrong thing."  That seems a dangerous message to give to anyone, let alone young children!

So, I went for (a) how they tricked the Israelites (b) long journeys vs. short journeys (c) even though the Israelites didn't want to help the Gibeonites after that, they had promised to, and we should always do what we promise.

I dressed up in old clothes (shame I threw out a load of more tattered ones quite recently!), and described how the old clothes made it look like it'd been a long journey ("They were new when we left!") and how they brought mouldy, smelly food with them (if I'd had more time the day before, I saw an idea about putting green food colouring on crackers to look like dry mouldy bread).

We them talked about saying you're going to do something, but then not wanting to do it: "if you say you're going to tidy your toys away, but then you don't really want to - should you still tidy them away?".  I got a couple of big nods from the older ones to this question!

The craft this week was colouring, using the main image from the first page of http://www.worduptime.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/JAM_Joshua6_yKJV.pdf.  A bit of a cop-out, but sometimes inspiration doesn't strike quite as hard as other weeks!

Toys: road playmat & vehicles; outdoor ride-on toys; food toys.

The Battle of Jericho (in 10 minutes)

Due to some confusion on the rota, I had to help out at the last minute with the week on the battle of Jericho.  This is what you can do with precisely 10 minutes of preparation:

Welcome the children, and give them a drink and a snack.

Get out a Duplo baseboard, and tell the children you need some help with building a wall for this week's story.  Can they bring you some Duplo pieces from the box, and you'll build a wall together?

If they don't fetch very many pieces, get them to bring the box closer, so you can get pieces out yourself.

Build a nice wall with no doors or windows.

Point out that the wall has no doors of windows - how could you get through it?  In this week's story, the Israelites (God's people) had to get into a city that had huge walls all the way round.

Tell the story of the battle of Jericho from memory (without the chance to check the details first!).  Count to seven together for the number of times the Israelites marched around Jericho ("Who can count to seven with me?").

Knock the Duplo wall down at the appropriate moment in the story (they joined in with knocking it down, too, with great glee).

Get out some A4 sheets of thin card and some stickers.  Roll the card up into trumpets and let them decorate them with the stickers and crayons.

Play with: construction toys and musical toys.

Phew!

Joshua and the Spies (Numbers 13)

This is the story where Joshua sends 12 men to find out what Canaan looks like, and gets mixed reports - giant fruit, but also giants!  I went for the theme of "exploring" from this story.

We started with plastic fruit "hidden" all round the room (mostly under chairs, in plain sight!).  As the children came in from church, I told them all that today's story was about exploring, and I needed some explorers to find the fruit hidden all over the room - then bring it back to the mat.

When all (well, most) of the fruit had been retrieved, we handed out drinks & biscuits, then looked at all the fruit we had found.  Could we name it all?  What's this one called?  How many pears do we have?  Etc.

Then it was story time.  I recapped where we had got to last time (Israelites had escaped from Egypt, and had got the the desert, on their way to the promised land). I used the "Beginners Bible" version, which has the giant bunch of grapes on one side of a double spread and the rest of the spies looking scared on the other side.  We talked about feeling hopeful vs feeling scared, and how we should trust in God, even when we're scared.

Then it was time to act out the story.  I had prepared a giant bunch of grapes, using a net bag filled with green ball pit balls.  With a chunky stick from the churchyard through the handle of the bag, I got two of the children to carry it round as we all went exploring together.  I used the tune/pattern of "We're going on a bear hunt":

Chorus:
We're going to the promised land. (children repeat)
But we're not scared. (children repeat)
What a beautiful day! (children repeat)

Uh, oh - grass!  Long, swishy grass!
We can't go over it. (repeat)
We can't go under it. (repeat)
We've got to go through it! (repeat)
Swishy, swashy, swishy swashy, etc. (with actions of sweeping the grass out of the way)

Chorus

Uh, oh - a river!  A deep, wide river!
Splish, splosh, etc.

Chorus

Uh, oh, mud!  Sticky, squelchy mud!
Squelch, squelch, etc.

Chorus

Uh, oh, giants!  Big, scary giants!
Quick, back through the mud, squelch, squelch, squelch, squelch,
back through the river, splish, splash, splish, splash
back through the grass, swishy swashy, swishy swashy
Back to our tents; zip up the tents (mime, and crouch down)
Phew, safe back at home!

We then had craft and playing time.  We had a colouring sheet with two men and the big bunch of grapes, where you could cut out the grapes and the stick, and stick it onto the pair of men.  We also had a communal craft, with a big sheet of paper with the outline of a bunch of grapes, and lots of green crepe paper to screw up into grapes and stick on.

For toys, I went with the food theme and got out the kitchen set and the farm set.  I also got out the ball pit, so we could empty out the "grapes" from the net and play with them in the pit.

Moses and the Ten Plagues of Egypt

Room preparation

• Cut out pictures of the individual plagues (I used these) and distribute around the edges of the room (not very hidden! - e.g. under/on chairs/tables).
• Get out the river rug and put it in the story corner.
• Find (ideally!) some long, dark red material that can cover the river on the mat.  E.g. a towel.  I found some great blood-coloured leatherette material in just about the right size & shape, in the material box.
• Get the ball pit out (empty).
• Get the bag of ball pit balls, near the story corner.

Starter

Take the register.  Call out each child's name as you note it down/tick it off the list, to make them feel welcomed and known.

Tell the children you need their help to find today's story.  Show them one set of the plague pictures (I had them separate, but it would have been better if I kept the reference set on a single sheet of paper), and send them off to find the rest around the room, and bring them back.

Get them to match the ones they find with the set you already have.

Don't worry if one or two pictures go missing!

Story

I read the story of the plagues from the Beginner's Bible, which gives an overview of the plagues, without being too repetitive.  This is good, as the rest of the session goes into lots of repetition!

Acting the Story

Next, we acted out the story, as inspired by this (although it adds in an extra first one, and misses out the lice; we followed the pictures on the circle (see below) instead).  For the river turning to blood, we covered the river on the rug with the red cloth, and they all jumped back instinctively, so that worked!  For the hailstorm, I told what hail was, them emptied a bag of ball pit balls over their heads, to much giggling.  For the final one, we didn't act out children dying (!), but I skipped straight on to the Israelites packing up, ready to leave Egypt, and got them all to put the ball pit balls into the ball pit itself - result!

Song

I had a circle picture of the 10 plagues (from this great blog - search the page for "teacher's visual"), which I held up for this section, pointing at each picture as we went along, with appropriate "yucky" or "sad" faces for the 3rd line of each verse.

I originally found one plagues song which looked do-able, but then had an idea for doing something based on "10 green bottles" instead (warning - you might be humming this for days):

There were ten plagues of Egypt; count them as we go...

Ten plagues of Egypt; count them as we go...

The first plague of Egypt: the river turned to blood.

And Moses said to Pharaoh, "Let my people go!"

The second plague of Egypt: the frogs all hopped around.

The third plague of Egypt was lots of itchy lice.

The fourth plague of Egypt: flied filled the air.

The fifth plague of Egypt: the animals all died. sad face

The sixth plague of Egypt was boils and itchy spots.

The seventh plague of Egypt was hail and thunderstorms.

The eighth plague of Egypt: the locusts ate the crops.

The ninth plague of Egypt: the day was black as night

Slower:

The tenth plague of Egypt: the oldest children died... and Pharaoh said to Moses ... go! ... Go! ... GO!

Snack

We re-gathered with drinks and pitta bread (crackers would work too, or actual matzah bread), while I told them the last part of the story, about the Israelites leaving in such a hurry that they didn't have time to wait for their bread to rise, so they made special flat bread.

Craft

We made the "palette" craft that I'd shown them earlier.  I'd cut out enough sets of the circles for the older ones (about 8) to stick onto their own paper plates (named on the back once finished, of course!).  This worked surprisingly well - they each had a pre-sorted stack of one big centre circle and ten smaller numbered circles with the pictures on, and they (almost) all got the numbers in the right order, roughly evenly distributed round the plate.

If I did this again, I'd cut round the circles in a square shape - cutting out circles takes ages - but they did look nice when all done.

Play

For those who were too little for craft, or less interested, or for after craft time, I got out the farm set (lots of animals) and Duplo (Israelites building for the Egyptians) - plus the ball pit from earlier!