Saul's Good Beginning

So last week we saw Saul anointed as the first king of Israel.  Where do kings usually live?  We handed around a paper with pictures of a palace, a wooden house, and a tent, and asked each kid where a king would live.  Of course the answer was a palace, but here was our humble king Saul, back home on the farm with his dad.

 

Meanwhile, over in the eastern part of Israel, the folks of Jabesh-Gilead were having a hard time of it. (several folks go into the bathroom & a folding table is pulled across the door, with a sign saying Jabesh-Gilead) No one had enough to eat.  Why?  Because the Ammonites were besieging the city.  (couple of kids with swords stand in front of the table).  The elders of the city decide there’s nothing to do but surrender and become slaves to the Ammonites, so they wave a white flag.  But the Ammonites respond, you’re welcome to be our slaves as long as you let us gouge out all your right eyes.  Hm, that’s not a very tempting proposition.  They say, give us seven days to think it over.  Now, in the Biblical account they come right out and say they want to use those seven days to call for reinforcements.  I don’t really get why the Ammonites would say sure, no problem, good luck!  So one of my “tweaks” of this story was to have someone sneak out of the city (head covered with a dark scarf) to go find Saul & ask for help.  Didn’t get a photo of the girl who did this, too bad.  Recently we have started star charts for both her & one other girl who can get real whiny about participating in the activities.  Now they can gain up to three stars each week for taking active part in the story, game, and craft.  So when this girl started acting reluctant to be our spy, we reminded her about getting a star and she was ready to go!  Ready to drag Saul back to Jabesh-Gilead by main force!  But first Saul grabbed his sword and his shield (HAD to have a shield…) and a couple of other reinforcements.  Off they go to rescue the city.  The reinforcements didn’t quite get it at first and began to thrust their swords at the poor besieged folks in the bathroom.  But eventually they “killed off” the Ammonites.  The inhabitants of the city came out rejoicing and praising Saul.  Again, I tweaked the Biblical account because I didn’t want to have to backtrack and bring out how some people had not wanted Saul to be king, which we hadn’t mentioned before, and then have these folks say they should be killed, etc., etc.  So instead I just had them praise Saul and give him “lucky money” envelopes.  But our humble Saul said, hey, the real giver of victory is not I but the Lord!  So he takes the lucky money and stuffs it in the offering box.

For our game, kids threw beanbags at this face to try & knock 

out its right eye.  Since the eye fit rather loosely, everyone succeeded!  All you needed to do was hit anywhere on the target with any oomph.

For craft we did shields (which is why Saul had to be sure to carry one to battle).  Kids just had to color in the large cardboard shapes and then attach arm loops to the back.

It worked out well that our new visitor had called me the night before to reconfirm the address, so I was alerted to prepare an extra-small shield for him.  The standard size would have swallowed him whole!