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!