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!
