Well, it had
been a long time since we’d looked at Joseph’s family going down to Egypt. Don’t know if anyone really remembered much
about that even with a quick few sentences’ review. But the Exodus was the obvious place to start
next. I skipped the birth of Moses,
since it wasn’t as directly related to the Exodus theme as his call.
First, though, since I hadn’t
been with the kids since before Chinese New Year, I asked how many had gone up
to China over the holidays. Most of them
had. We tried to look at where they had
gone on a China map. Not everyone knew
the place name, so that fell a bit flat.
Then from there we asked how long they’d stayed. Had they stayed 400 years? Would they have wanted to? Well, that’s how long Joseph’s family ended
up staying in Egypt—of course by that time it wasn’t Joseph and his brothers
but their great-great-etc. grandchildren.
The king of Egypt was also a
great-great-great descendant, and he wasn’t friends with Joseph’s family like
his ancestor was. He made them all
slaves! We showed a picture of the
pyramids of Egypt, and said, maybe they were the very slaves that built these
pyramids. (I didn’t research this—were
they or weren’t they?) So we played a
game involving building pyramids.
Divided into two teams. Each got
a set of numbered paper “bricks” and had to stick them, relay fashion, into the
correspondingly numbered brick shapes in one of the two pyramids drawn on the
whiteboard. It was pretty easy; the
hardest part was trying to keep them playing in line/in order! But one pyramid ended up being finished both
faster and more neatly than the other.
So was that team rewarded?
Nope—these guys were slaves, right?
So instead the losing team got “punished” by being made to run down
& up two flights of stairs. But then
we made the other team run too, and in fact everyone got a bang out of it. Giggles all the way down & up.
Next we introduced Moses, who
was actually one of Joseph’s family but had been adopted by the princess, so he
didn’t have to be a slave. But he still
cared about his people. One day he saw
one of the slaves working very hard carrying water
and was very
upset when he saw an Egyptian whipping the slave to work harder. So he killed the Egyptian and buried him
(her) in the sand (under a blanket). The
next day he saw two of his own people arguing and he tried to stop them. One said, are you going to kill me too? So Moses knew that he was in trouble and he
decided to run away from Egypt. He
grabbed his blanket & stuffed it in a bag & got out of there. (Now he wasn’t in Egypt any more, so we took
the pyramids down.)
We stopped and asked, did Moses
care about his people? Was the way he
tried to help them a good idea? Probably
would have been better if he’d asked God’s help, huh. But did God care? God always cares! (our theme for this &
the next lesson). We put up I Peter 5:7
on the board and read it together, but it was too long a verse to try and
remember the whole thing. So we had one
of the kids come up and circle the last five words of the verse in Chinese,
which are just four words in English: He cares for you (他 顧 念 你 們)
We practiced saying
just that phrase. Most would say it
aloud. I get a bit frustrated by the one
girl who is perfectly capable of doing so but won’t. Sigh.
I try not to let my frustration show.
(Later when reporting the morning’s lesson to the parents, I made a
point of praising one of the other girls for being quick to respond and knowing
the answers. I said, maybe next time I
will be able to report, the best behaved and smartest girl this morning was
.
We’ll have to see.)
So back to our story, now Moses
is in the desert, taking care of some sheep.
We put a picture of a flock of sheep on the board and gave Moses the
pole that our slave had earlier used to carry water with. One day, he saw something really strange—a
bush that was on fire but not burning up.
He went over to look at it, and God’s voice spoke out of the bush. He told Moses to take off his shoes. (Why?
So he couldn’t run away, maybe?)
God tells Moses He wants him to lead His people out of Egypt. Moses says no because he’s too afraid. So God shows him what he can do to show the
king that God is with him. He has him
throw down his staff and it becomes a: “Bandage!”
yells one of the kids. Yes, our snake
was an ace bandage with a snake head taped on one end. :-) Moses was afraid of the snake, and tried to
run away from it (got that from Ken Medema, not from the Bible, but it set the
stage for the game we played later...).
But God told him to pick it up, and when he did, it turned back into a
staff.
Moses still didn’t want to go;
he complained that he wasn’t a good talker.
God said, come on, who created men’s mouth’s, anyway? (Who? Our star girl said, God did! She has learned something!!) Moses still didn’t want to go, but God said,
GO, and GO NOW! So Moses quick put his
shoes back on, grabbed his bag with his blanket, and left.
Next we had craft time, where we
made “burning bushes” like the one Moses had seen in our story. For this craft we combined ideas from two
different craft projects I’d seen on the internet. We had kids trace their hands on brown card
stock to be the bush branches, but had them trace two hands and then, after
sticking on a bunch of leaves prepped with two-sided tape, slit and fitted the
two hands together to make three-dimensional bushes. Stuck them upright in small cups of sand and
draped some orange tissue over them for flames.
I had been afraid we weren’t
going to have enough activities to fill the hour, but we almost didn’t have
enough time to play the final game. I
really wanted to play it though, so we squeezed it in. We tied all the kids together in line by
criss-crossing a length of plastic string around & between them. The resulting “snake” had to chase our
volunteer “Moses” down the stairs and come back up the elevator. Lots more giggles! Then we wound up by going into the parents’
room for announcements still strung together.
One boy was way too antsy to get untied, so no photos. At least we’d managed to get him all the way
through the game!
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