Jacob's Favorite Son

     We started today’s lesson by doing the craft we hadn’t had time for last week.  If Jacob had twelve sons, and he couldn’t just go to a furniture store and buy a new bed, he must have had to make a lot of beds!  So we followed suit and made these cute cradles out of empty Pringles cans.  I 

ate a lot of potato chips in preparation for this one! :-)

                

                Next, we did a little exercise in which the kids had to find the right son on the whiteboard and match it with the right mother as we read out the birth order story.  Not that we are trying to get them to remember all those names, but it’s good reading practice.  Okay, so we said last week that Jacob loved Rachel best, so then which was his favorite son?  Her oldest boy Joseph.  Even though he made beds for all his sons, only for Joseph did he make a fancy coat, so together we made just one fancy coat.  Originally I was going to just lay out the paper “tunic” on a large table that they could all stand around while attach the strips of double-sided-tape-backed wrapping paper to front and back.  But then I realized it would be more fun to have one of our volunteers wear it while the strips were being stuck on.  Then when it was done, everyone got to put it on and get their picture taken.

                We tried to talk a little about jealousy between brothers & sisters, and some of the kids did express that they knew how it felt.  We said that Joseph had made things a little worse by boasting, but that we were going to try doing a little of that ourselves. Each one in turn had to come stand on a low stool in the front of the room. I had also brought a portable microphone in hopes that hearing their voices echo would motivate them to speak up.  They all seemed to like getting up on the stool, but the mike was something of a fizzle.  The grunter still grunted, the echolalic was still echolalic, and the girl who has to be coaxed to speak at the best of times was flummoxed by the mike—kept trying to stick it in her ear instead of up to her mouth (mikes help you hear better, right?) :-)  Part two of this exercise was to do what is better, and instead of saying good things about yourself, each person was supposed to say something good about the person on the stool.  “He drools,” volunteered one girl promptly.  Psst…you’re supposed to say something GOOD.  “Oh—well, he has a fat stomach!”  Sigh.

                After all this hard work, we needed to do something a little more physical.  So we introduced our Bible phrase for the week, 追求和睦的事 or  “pursue those things which make for peace.”  One of those things being cooperation, and our game involved some cooperation, as well as concentration and dexterity skills.  The six words of the phrase, with magnetic strips on the back, were stuck to a cookie sheet, with the edges sticking out so they could be grasped with a clothespin.  The kids lined up & the person at the end of the line would take a word and it had to be passed to the front of the line from clothespin to clothespin, with the front kid sticking it on the whiteboard and then running back to the end of the line.   Yes, we had quite a few fumbles, but it was fun to watch at least some of them gradually get the hang of when to pinch and when to let go.  Our final “thing which made for peace” was to tidy up the room and line up the desks (and being rewarded with a snack) before going over to gather with the adults for announcements.