Commandment One

First thing to do was to have one of the kids paste the first commandment up on the big "tablets" at the front of the room. Only as I was having him read it out did I realize that I had made a typo & written 耶和話 for耶和華. Oops!

We told the story of King Josiah and the discovery of the scroll in the temple that made him realize how far the nation had gone away from God, and the danger of having done so. That morning I had put several drawings of altars or "totem poles" up on the walls, which were used during the story to illustrate how the land was filled with worship of false gods. So at the end the kids had to take them all down and tear them up.

Our game followed the theme of "destruction"—a relay race with two stacks of fairly simple puzzles that had to be completely taken apart, no pieces still stuck together, before the next person in line could go. Should have been a good game but between two adults needed to receive the puzzle pieces into separate bags (so we wouldn't have to sort them all out at the end), and one to keep the kids waiting in line instead of running up & surrounding the players as they like to do, no one was watching the ends of the lines. So somehow they didn't come out even & we never did figure out who had been left out of the race. Sigh.

We made little "phylacteries" for craft time which worked great three years ago, but this time I used the wrong kind of paper, I guess; the glue just didn't want to stick it together well enough. The kids had these flapping-open boxes bobbing on their foreheads…I am not batting 1.000 on crafts these days!!