Birth of Moses

Going back to where we left the descendants of Israel in Egypt, we began by explaining how things had changed for them. As relatives of Joseph they had enjoyed a somewhat privileged position; now, they were slaves. To illustrate this we had an "Egyptian" recline in the lazy-boy, while one child fanned her with this huge wall fan (if we'd opened it all the way it would have taken two kids to fan the girl!), and another knelt to present her a glass of water on a tray. Of course, worse was yet to come; Pharaoh stood and read out the decree that girl babies could live and boy babies would be thrown into the Nile. We passed out paper cutouts of boy & girl babies to all the girls & women, then had a "soldier" with a sword come and inspect them all. He gave the girl babies back but the boys got ripped in half and thrown onto our blue tissue paper Nile. (I was careful not to give boy babies to our most not-want-to-let-go-of-anything girl, or our new visitor!)

Next we introduced a certain mother, her son Aaron, her daughter Miriam, and her new baby (doll) that she was very reluctant to throw in the Nile. She got a basket, lined it not with pitch (too messy!) but a plastic tablecloth, then towels to wrap the baby in. She put the basket in the "Nile" and set Miriam to stand guard. Along comes the princess who rescues the baby. Quick-witted Miriam suggests finding a wet-nurse & comes back with mom. The princess gives her a bag of coins and she promises happily to keep him until he is weaned.

Our very popular game involved fishing "precious things" out of water. We played hot-potato with the baby doll & whoever ended up with it had a go at fishing bobbing malted-milk balls out of a bottle of water with a 3-cm. neck, using chopsticks. Took a little patience, but if our kids are motivated by anything, it's chocolate! (What can I say? Me too!)

For our craft we folded little paper "Easter baskets" and tucked in our little cardboard clipart babies with pocket tissues. Minor emergency when more kids wanted purple paper than I had prepared; fortunately I found just enough extra pieces to dry up the tears!