The Three Wise Men

I didn't get any pictures this time. I was telling the story & was just too wired from the busy weekend. Oh well, we had a good time anyway. We introduced our three wisemen ("wisepersons"), all wearing neckties to illustrate their status. They were looking at the stars stuck to the ceiling fan through a telescope (two telescoping paper towel rolls). Then suddenly this very large star appeared, held up on a stick by one of the girls. Interesting, most stars travelled in some kind of orbital pattern (ceiling fan turned on slow speed), but this new one was going in a straight line. They decide to follow it, so each takes a tote bag containing a towel and a wrapped gift, and set off following the star.

Eventually it leads them to King Herod's palace. They figure this must be because the star signifies a newborn king, so they get in to see Herod and ask, where's the new baby king? We've been following the star that told us he had been born. Oh-oh, Herod doesn't like this news. He has no new baby son, but he remembers some prophecy from somewhere about a star arising from Jacob that will rule. (we had someone read parts of Numbers 24:17-19 from a prepared scroll) But HE wants to keep ruling! So he goes and finds some Bible experts and asks them where this ruler is supposed to be born. They look up and read Micah 5:2—answer: Bethlehem.

So Herod goes back and says, okay, no new baby here, but you can expect to find him in Bethlehem. When you do, come back and tell me where exactly, so I can go pay my respects too. They agree & leave, after which Herod gloats, ha, I can kill this baby and then I can be the only king again!

The star now leads them to one of the side rooms. They knock and out comes one of the girls holding a baby doll. They ask when it was born & she answers, "December 25^th," so they know it must be the right baby. They give mother & baby the gifts from their bags, and they all get a chance to cuddle the baby a little. Then they leave. They know they're supposed to go back to Herod's palace, but they're too tired from all their traveling & it's late, so they pull the towels from their bags and go to sleep on the floor. But during the night an angel appears and tells them not to go back to the palace. So when they get up they go into the other bedroom and re-enter the living room through the back balcony.

Our game was another relay race, based on the three gifts of gold, frankincense and myrrh. Various small wooden blocks had been labeled with one of these gift names, & each team had enough so that each kid could find & bring a set of three to "Mary & baby" sitting at the front of the room. Somehow, it should have been more fun than it was. I think it would have been better if there had been more blocks to have to paw through, with some having totally irrelevant labels. I was too cheap, I guess. I was able to find a box of 32 small blocks (actually Chinese Chess pieces) for a very cheap price and said, good, I don't have to spend a lot. I could have bought two boxes and it still would have been cheap.

The wisemen brought their gifts in "treasure boxes" but we usually receive our Christmas gifts in stockings, so we made stockings for our craft. The patterns were cut out of plastic report covers which were handily red in back & clear in front. They added a white top made from a folded card with cotton balls stuck to it, punched holes around the edges, then sewed the whole thing together with green yarn, leaving enough for a hanger at the top. The hole punches were not quite heavy-duty enough (even though I'd bought bigger ones—in fact, the small ones that had been a disaster with the crossing-of-the-red-sea craft (May 28) did a better job than the big clunkers—sigh), so there was some frustration. But all was forgiven when I got them all filled with candy during the free time!

We had a potluck scheduled, with food to be delivered at 12:00. They had trouble finding the place and didn't arrive until 12:45. Mrs. Ng had brought some scrumptious homemade dumplings so we polished those off while we waited. Finally the food came—and along with it, a boy & his mom who have been frequently late in the past, but NEVER this late. I mean, if the food had come on time, we would have been mostly done eating it by the time they showed up! How did they KNOW??

Christmas Eve

For the 4^th year in a row, we joined several other churches to take part in a "Christmas concert" at a local tourist attraction. This year, three things were different.

1. We only sang once instead of twice, so it didn't get to be such a terribly long and late night.

2. We added a new feature, a recorder duet by myself and one of our neurotypical girls who's been learning recorder at school.

3. We had these nifty new t-shirts, paid for by a Christmas gift from the family of one of our sometime-volunteers.

Oh, and 4., we invited a friend, George Dunlop, to take pictures for us, and he did a great job!

Elizabeth and Mary

One of my favorite stories in the curriculum. First we see Zacharias the priest going into the holy of holies. It's very dark in there (I imagine anyway. It certainly was in the tabernacle!), so we turned off the lights. Suddenly an angel appears! Zacharias is afraid, but the angel says, don't be afraid, your prayers have been answered. Zacharias scratches his head and wonders to himself, which prayer? I pray a lot of prayers! The angel says, your wife is going to have a son. You've got to be kidding, says Zacharias! Is this for real?

The angel is a bit annoyed (I'm definitely taking some license here) and says, I'm God's messenger, I'm standing in the holy of holies, and you accuse me of lying? You want to know if this is for real, then I'll give you a sign: you won't be able to speak your doubts—or anything else!—until your son is born, and you name him John.

Zacharias comes out and people ask him why he's been in there so long. He flaps his arms—there was a bird in there? No, no—he traces a circle on his head—oh, an angel! What did he say? He pantomimes holding a baby. The angel was holding a baby? No, no—he goes and finds his wife, the oldest woman present (60-something, perfect!) and pats her stomach. Oh, she's going to have a baby! Wonderful!

Cut to Mary sitting by herself. The angel appears again, and says, Don't be afraid, you are greatly blessed by God and will have a son. Mary says (again, taking some license), I can't figure out how this could be since I'm not married yet, but if you say so, it must be true! The angel says, you haven't asked for a sign, but I will give you one. Your relative Elizabeth is also going to have a son in her old age. She is already six months pregnant.

The angel leaves and Mary decides to go visit Elizabeth. She knocks on a door and out comes the pregnant Elizabeth!

Her pillow is showing, but everyone got the point and loved it!

When she hears Mary's voice, the baby jumps in her womb. Soon Elizabeth's time comes to disappear into the bedroom & come back out minus pillow but holding a baby. Everyone congratulates her & someone asks, are you going to call him Zacharias junior? Zacharias gets up, gestures No, no, and gets pen & paper, and writes "His name is John." As soon as he finished writing, he could speak again, and praises God.

For our game, we imitated the unborn John the Baptist and "jumped for joy" over a length of string held at higher and higher levels.

Craft time, also a favorite, was folding paper angel bodies, but then attaching prepared photos of each person's head, and pasting on a halo. Since no one takes their crafts home anyway, we then stuck all the angels on a Christmas tree on the wall.

One of our girls put her head on a bit too low, making her angel a bit hunchbacked looking. Later on she asked if she could take her angel off the tree. Why? Because her neck was starting to get sore! She was really worried that she had caused this by placing her angel head wrong! But I said I could fix her neck and "kissed it better." She seemed okay after that!

Esther part 2

Even with holding the beauty contest last week, this turned out to be a long story. But great drama! We started with the brief scene of Mordecai sitting outside the palace gate and overhearing the plot to assassinate the king. He writes a (seriously condensed) message: (Beware!) to Esther who passes it to the king. The plot is foiled, and the message gets pasted in the king's scrapbook.

Next we see the proud Haman being annoyed by the fact that Mordecai won't bow to him. So he suggests to the king that all the Jews be killed & the king says, sure go ahead. Moredecai sends Esther another very brief message (SOS), but this time she doesn't pass it on to the king. She writes back (Can't!) and he responds (Must!). The narrative, of course, spells out more detail, but no way could we have the kids write complete messages. So anyway, then everyone kneels down to "pray and fast" for the count of three (days). Esther goes to see the king and he welcomes her. She invites him and Haman to a feast for the following night. (We cut this down to just one feast. Saved time & didn't change the basic plot.)

Haman is really puffed up now; he's the only commoner invited to the royal feast. (I am SO PROUD of our Haman. He used to be one of our biggest behavior problems but lately he has been doing so well. He actually got into hamming it up, this time! I love it!) Only one thing mars his self-congratulations: that Mordecai still refuses to bow to him. Hmm…why wait until the day for all the Jews to be killed? Since he's in such obvious favor with the king, why not ask tomorrow morning that Mordecai be put to death right away?

That night the king can't sleep so he's browsing through his scrapbook. He comes across the note written by Mordecai that saved his life, and realizes he has never done anything to reward him, for shame!

So the next morning Haman shows up, and before he can get a word out, the king asks him, what should be done for someone I want to honor? Haman is sure he's the one the king means, so he thinks of something he'd really like: wearing the king's robe & crown, riding the king's horse, and having someone lead him around the city telling everyone how much the king honors him. The king says: Fantastic idea! Go get Mordecai and do that for him right now! Haman has no choice but to comply:

Whew, that was awful. Good thing he hadn't put forth his request!! Oh well, he still has this wonderful banquet to look forward to, right? And wonderful it was!

Afterward the king is so happy he says to Esther, absolutely anything you want, what can I do for you? She says, "Just save my life from the wicked enemy who wants to kill me and my people." The king says, who would dare do such a thing? Esther points dramatically to Haman. The king calls for his soldiers, who pull a pillowcase over his head and lead him off. (Haman really did do a great job, but he couldn't take the pillowcase; that was a bit too much.) The king does away with the order for the extermination of the Jews, & he & Esther live happily ever after. (Yes, I know, the laws of the Medes and the Persians could not be revoked, but it was simpler this way and again, didn't really change the basic plot.)

Our game was to determine whether the king would allow you in to see him, since in our story that was an iffy thing. We had the "king" (one of our fathers) sit on his throne, with an armed soldier guarding the invisible door about six feet in front of him (to prevent the kids from crushing too close and spoiling the idea that not just anyone can approach the king). Then we had each child draw a "Do" card provided from "The Appreciation Game." If they were able to do what it said, they could get in to see the king, who gave them a treat. Everyone passed.

The king wore a crown, Esther wore a crown, even Mordecai wore a crown for a little while, so our craft was making crowns.

Since I wasn't sure I had enough of the gold paper to make a model, I didn't discover ahead of time that the pieces didn't stay stuck to the headband very well. It was getting sort of frustrating until someone had the idea to grab a stapler. Next time, double-sided tape on the headband would be the way to go.

Esther, part 1

We decided to split the story of Esther into two parts so we could include more details—and, of course, have more fun!

First off we had to place the Jews in Persia, so we had everyone stand, & explained how because Israel had sinned, God had brought enemies against them. Many died (sat down) and the rest were carted off to exile in different countries (walked once around the room). We introduced two who ended up in Persia: Mordecai and his young cousin Esther.

Next we introduced King Ahasuerus, who liked to party and show off his wealth. At one particular party, he wanted to show off his wife as well. So he sent a servant to tell her to put on her crown and come let everyone see her beauty. But the queen took the crown from the servant, put it on her head, and said, "I'm the queen! If I don't want to go, I don't have to go!" The king discusses this horrible loss of face with his advisors. They all agree that Vashti could not be queen anymore or wives everywhere would get the idea that it was okay to disobey their husbands.

So then the king needs a new queen, and they hold a beauty contest to determine who it will be. All the beautiful young girls in the city are gathered to the palace. We were short three of our usual "young girls" so we recruited three moms to fill the ranks of contestants. First, they spent a whole year in cosmetic treatment—we had them all spray themselves lightly with perfume, put on some hand lotion, and then pat their faces with the puff from a (powderless) compact (actually a small folding mirror). Finally the great day came when all the candidates were to present themselves to the king. They were all taken by a servant into one of the side bedrooms where I had readied an array of dresses, which each girl put on over their clothes. Then they sashayed out one at a time—we had some hams among both mothers and daughters; great fun!!

The Bible says they were allowed to "bring anything they wanted" with them from the harem. I'm not sure exactly what they might want to bring so I had it be gifts (of little snacks) for the king—who thoroughly enjoyed playing his role of watching all these silly girls parading through in their oversized dresses while munching his goodies!

As we know, in the end, Esther was the winner. She is crowned and we all sing the wedding march while she & the king walk down the room together.

We combined game & craft into one activity this time, as it was kind of both in one anyway. We had the kids divide into two teams, with the two sitting down facing each other. We had an odd number of kids though, so called for a volunteer and got Mr. Lei. Then, we explained, we were going to do some "cosmetic treatment" like the candidates in the story's beauty contest. First, the kids in team one painted the faces of their opposite number, then team two returned the favor. Some kids barely put enough paint on to be visible, others were quite enthusiastically artistic! (Mr. Lei's partner was one, as was the girl partnering Wing Yan...)

I was most thrilled, though, with the pair-up of Ka Hei and Ying Wai. It was so neat to see both of them paint creatively and tolerate being painted in return—both did better than we expected.

The big disappointment was that Sally was absent; she loves craft time but has trouble making eye contact. I wanted to see how she would do with having to look at someone's face to do the craft! I wonder if we could arrange a special session with her some time..?

Adult Bible study centered on whether wives were supposed to always obey their husbands—some good discussion, if not as completely open in the sharing time as we might have liked.

A Special Sunday

We had heard about a sister church in Hong Kong that had a Sunday school program for special-needs kids and their parents, and this Sunday was finally the one where we were all able to get together. We had nearly fifty, so were very thankful to be able to borrow the Centro O Amanhecer daycare center for the occasion.

We took a break from our unit on Old Testament women in favor of a story that would have a more direct application to both groups: the importance of thankfulness. Conveniently, this was just three days after the American holiday of Thanksgiving!

The story of Jesus healing the ten lepers is not terribly long, but it took plenty enough time to get all our lepers kitted out in bandages and face masks.

Lai Wun ended up looking more like a surgeon than a leper, but she was cute anyway!

One thing we could all be thankful for was that, whatever our problems, none of us are afflicted with leprosy! In Bible times it was a particularly frightening disease, entailing as it did exile from the community. We had folks throwing stones (paper wads) at them. A few of the kinder ones threw food (small packets of crackers) for the lepers to share. All in all a miserable existence. So when they saw Jesus at a distance, having heard that He was a healer, they all cried out for mercy. Jesus told them to go show themselves to the priest. They scratched their heads at that. How come? Did Jesus want the priests to confirm their leprosy so He would know what He was up against, or what? Whatever—they started walking, when suddenly, one of the boys (who had been complaining that he wanted to take his bandage off anyway) said, "Hey, guys, I have feeling in my leg all of a sudden!" He got to take off his bandage and say, look, it's healed! That was the signal for everyone to take off their bandages, give high fives all around, and head off for the unseen priest (a volunteer just escorted them out the door of the main room temporarily. All but one, who stopped and said, I better go back and thank Jesus while I still know where He is. (Actually, our Jesus had disappeared; tired of his inactive role. So his brother became the stand-in.) So the one came back and knelt at His feet saying, praise God, praise God! Jesus lifted her up and praised her for having a thankful heart which is even more special to God than strict obedience.

For our game, we divided into two teams. Instead of running to Jesus and falling to their knees, the race involved running to Jesus on their knees. He would then lift them up and they could run back to their team. The extra twist in this was that each "runner" had to wear knee protectors (those lepers need to protect their skin, you know!), so as each child got back to their team they had to take them off for the next child to put on. This was not exactly done "decently and in order," and you couldn't prove which team had actually won, but it was fun anyway!

The craft was fairly simple; making "tambourines" to sing praises with. Each child got a foil pie plate, and eight small jingle bells to attach along the rim with florist wire. Everyone seemed to prefer wearing them as hats rather than using them as musical instruments, though!

We didn't have a regular Bible study during the last period; while the kids had some free play time, the adults heard a testimony of thankfulness for God's grace from a Hong Kong father with two autistic sons. Afterward we all enjoyed a catered "potluck" meal together, while families from the two churches got to know one another better in individual conversations. A group this large every week would be truly exhausting (I trust if we get this large we will have more volunteers available!), but once in a while is great!