The Ten Plagues

              Lots of activities to participate in for this story.  So many that I didn’t end up using the craft I’d prepared!  First, we reviewed our Bible phrase from three weeks ago: “God cares for you,”  & reminded everyone how God had shown His care for His people by sending Moses to bring them out of Egypt.

                So now, Moses is ready & he goes to see Pharaoh.  Pharaoh says no & so Moses pulls out his supposed deal-clincher, the rod that turns into a snake.  (I decided to leave Aaron out of the story.  Same plot, less complications.)  But then Pharaoh calls his magician, who throws down her rod, which also becomes a snake.  Even though Moses’ snake eats up the magician’s snake, Pharaoh refuses to let the people go.  Moses kneels down & asks God, did You trick me, or what?  God answers, don’t worry, by the time I get done with Pharaoh, he won’t just let the people go, he will drive them out!  So then God started doing things to Pharaoh and his people.  We had our adult volunteer wear the Pharaoh headdress (and say, NO, NO! after the first nine plagues) so that all the kids could participate in the activities, which were:

--God turned their drinking water into blood (I had some chicken blood I’d saved in the fridge a few days and then left out in the warm kitchen overnight.  Boy did it STINK!  Everyone had to take a whiff—UGH!)

--God made frogs appear (everyone hops like a frog)

--God made gnats (translated the same as fleas in Chinese) appear (everyone scratches themselves)

--God made flies appear (I had stuck several pictures of flies around the walls before anyone arrived; now the kids had to go around whacking at them with flyswatters)

--God made the animals get sick & die (first we all got down on hands & knees & mooed, then we all had to fall over)

--God sent a terrible hailstorm (everyone cowered under umbrellas while I threw styrofoam balls at them)

 

--God caused sores to break out on everyone’s skin (everyone got a bandaid to put on)

--God caused swarms of locusts to appear, eating everything in sight and getting in your house so everywhere you walked you were crunching locusts (we put a picture of a locust on the board so they could see what we were talking about, but then strew popcorn on the floor so we could all walk over it & hear the crunch, crunch)

--God caused a thick darkness to fall for three days (we all squished into the windowless bathroom, turned off the lights, and talked about what you wouldn’t be able to do with it so dark)

--Finally, God said, this one was going to be the worst, and the only way to avoid it was to do exactly what He said.  Which was to kill a lamb and put some of its blood on the doorposts of your house.  Otherwise your firstborn children would die.  So we had a yarn-covered “lamb” jar full of what was more or less red cornstarch paste.  But it turned out more pink when each once chose a door to paint it on.

 

Then Pharaoh tried to wake up his “firstborn” doll, but of course it didn’t answer.  So sure enough, he drove the people out before anything even worse could happen.  We reminded everyone that this is what God had promised, and He did it because He really did care for His people.  Then we went around the room and asked if God cared for…(name)…and for…(name), etc.

                Our game was a quiet one for a change.  We had a sixteen-square “Bingo” game made up of pictures representing the ten plagues plus six other Exodus-related items (Pharaoh, Moses, pyramids, nighttime, snake, & lamb).  Interesting job to come up with ten playing cards with the pictures in different order!  But we still had more than one winner in a couple of the rounds, but that was good because then everyone got a prize without it dragging on too long.

                Then we did a little exercise where we divided the kids into two groups, the “God” team and the “Pharaoh” team.  We assigned our one girl who can actually read at grade level to read a list of the plagues, after which we said, “And God said:”  --  “And Pharaoh said:” --  The God team was supposed to say, let the people go, & the Pharaoh team was supposed to say, No, No (until the last time when they were supposed to say God, Go!).  They were NOT getting into it, except for Ka Hei who was an enthusiastic Naysayer for the Pharaoh team.  While Man Chun on the “God” team was actually willing to speak up with some nudging.   Since he usually doesn’t verbalize at all, this was exciting!  So when we reported to the parents at the end of the morning, we had Pin Pin read the plagues, but then instead of whole teams we just had Ka Hei and Man Chun doing the responses. 

 

 You see why we called it the God team instead of the Moses team—it was easier to come up with a halo for God than to figure out how to represent Moses.  And the craft we were supposed to do was these Pharaoh headdresses, so it was just as well we only had the one kid be Pharaoh since we didn’t have the other headdresses!