Crossing the Red Sea

Today's story was pretty short—but that was okay because craft time was loooong.

We got all the kids kitted out with their "luggage" (carrier bags with towels inside) and they walked around the room following "God" (a volunteer in a halo), who held aloft a pillar of cloud for the first round (daytime) and a pillar of fire for the second (nighttime). Then we had them "camp" by the shore of the Red Sea, which was two blue-patterned sheets on the floor. Our adult "Egyptians," decided to chase after the trapped Israelites, so God told Moses to lift up his rod. He did so & two other volunteers lifted up the sheets to the right and to the left. All the kids walked through to the other side. Then the Egyptians came along, Moses put up his rod again, and they got the sheets draped over them. Much rejoicing by the Israelites, end of story.

For game time, paper war chariots were fastened to the shower curtain in the bathroom. Kids took turns "drowning the Egyptians" with squirt guns.

Craft time was a somewhat complicated art project depicting the parting of the sea.

Each of the steps was fairly simple; there were just a lot of them. One of the last steps was to punch holes along each side of the two layers of the project to sew them together. That's what the directions in the craft book said. When I translated them for the leader, I suggested it would be better to pass the layers out pre-punched. But then when I did the sample myself, I discovered that I had to glue some things on over some of the holes. So I told the leader to ignore my translation. We didn't have enough hole punchers for everyone, but since everyone wasn't going to be ready at exactly the same time, they could just go to a couple of designated helpers to get the holes punched when needed. Well. I think that would have worked brilliantly if we'd had good old-fashioned scissor-style hole punchers. Instead I had these stapler-style things that just didn't have wide enough openings to get through all the two layers once we'd added the sand and the sea. It was very awkward. One of the parents figured out you could just sew it together without holes if you pushed the (blunt) needle hard enough, so that's basically what we did. What thrilled me so much about all this was that NO ONE made any whiny remarks about how this should have been thought through better. The attitude of every single person there was, "okay, let's work together and figure this out."

I LOVE MY CHURCH!