This time,
when I started by asking the question, what have we been talking about so far,
Lai Ting piped up with, “God created the world!” Woo-hoo!
Made my day! We reviewed that He
also created each of us, and loves us.
So—when God created the first
people, they lived in a beautiful garden.
The first thing we did, then, was to make flowers for the garden, out of
chenille stems, and taped them up along the bottom of the whiteboard. Next we put up six different fruit tree
drawings. God told the people they could
eat the fruit off of any of the trees except this particular one. We reviewed this several times so hopefully
everyone had it in their heads which trees were okay & which was the no-no.
To tell the Bible story, we had
one girl come up to the front to be Eve.
At first none of the girls wanted to volunteer; finally one suggested
that one of the boys do it. I said, but
he’s a boy, he’ll have to play the man.
Did you want him to be your husband?
Yes. Okay, then, you have to be
the woman. Voilà, instant volunteer! So then along comes a snake (another boy,
with a sock snake puppet on his arm) and started talking to her. Do snakes talk? No, but they must have back in that perfect
garden, because the woman didn’t seem all that surprised. So the snake asks, did God say you couldn’t
eat any of the fruit in the garden? (Did
God say that? NO!) So Eve explains and
the snake says, ha, God is lying to you, you won’t die! (Would God lie to us? NO!) But he persuades her to try the forbidden
fruit. She pretends to pick and eat
some. Then along comes her husband, and
she says, look, I ate some of this fruit and I’m not dead! Do you want to try some? (Should he try it too? NO!) But he does.
And the snake laughs at them.
Now, God comes to the garden to
talk with them. One of our boys loves to
wear the halo, so he got to be God. The
man & woman tried to hide from Him, but there are no good places to hide in
our new classroom, so God found them! :-)
He said, why are you hiding from me; did you eat the fruit you weren’t
supposed to eat? They admitted they
did. I skipped the bit about nakedness,
and also decided to forgo the specific punishments as too much to digest. Instead, the snake just went & sat down,
while God told the people that He was going to have to punish them for their
disobedience by banishing them from the perfect garden. That they would grow old, and get sick, and
die, and all their descendants would die too.
But when they did die, they would be able to see Him face to face again,
just like they had in the garden, because God still loved them (hugs them both).
I tried to get some feedback
from the story—what did you learn? Is it
a good thing to obey the rules? Does God
still love you even when you are naughty?
Does your mom/teacher still love you even when you are naughty? Does your mom/teacher sometimes have to
punish you even though they still love you?
So is it a good thing to be obedient?
Next we played a fun game to
reinforce the story. We sat in a circle
& everyone got a paper cup. We
explained that this jar of M&M’s was like the fruit in the garden. Brown M&M’s were the fruit you weren’t
supposed to eat; everything else was okay.
So first, everyone got one M&M in their cup, with one person getting
a brown one. Then we turned on some
music and had them start passing the cups.
When the music stopped, whoever had other colors could eat them right
away. But the one with the brown piece
had to make a choice. Either they could
go ahead and eat their M&M, but then be out of the game, or they could
choose not to eat it, but keep playing and have a chance to get other colors. We played it enough times so that every kid
got the brown piece once, and every single kid made the choice to not eat
it. I was impressed!! NOT impressed with their ability to pass the
cups along smoothly, however. If we have
time to play the game again this Sunday, we will, even though they already “got
it,” partly because games with food are popular, and partly to help them work
on passing stuff, ha! I’m sure it will
be a useful skill for more games down the road!
By now time was starting to run
out, so we didn’t take time to discuss specific applications to our Bible
verse/phrase for the lesson, which was 學習行善 or, “learn to do right” from Isaiah
1:17. Instead we just passed out copies
of the verse written in large “hollow” characters for them to color in. We’ll talk and pray about applications this
coming Sunday.
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