Plague 1

Today we continued our exploration of the life of Moses by reading about the first plague (turning the Nile to blood) in Exodus 7:14-25 and looking at the Brick Testament depiction of this story. We then did a craft to depict the story for ourselves. See the pictures and videos below to get the idea.

For the craft, each child needed

• a piece of white (or beige) cardstock
• a strip of blue paper
• a strip of red paper
• a popsicle stick
• tape
• markers
• clear cellophane (optional, but very popular)

Since we had extra time at the end the children had fun embellishing the scene with miscellaneous arts and crafts supplies. They made reeds to go alongside the Nile out of green tissue paper and fashioned miniature Moseses out of corks, popsicle sticks, and cotton balls. 

To make the Nile

1. Fold the cardstock in half the short way (so it remains 8.5 inches on one side). Then open it up and fold one side in to meet the middle crease and the other side in just past the middle crease. (The creases should all be in the same direction.) Reopen the paper. You now have four panels: panel 1 and 2 are each one-quarter the width of the full sheet, panel 3 is slightly less than one-quarter of the width, and panel 4 is slightly more than one-quarter of the width.
2. Cut a river-shaped region along most of the length of panel 2 and cover the river region with cellophane by taping the cellophane over this region on what will be the inside of the panel when you fold the cardstock along the creases you've made.
3. Cover the inside of panel 1 with the strip of blue paper and draw fish on it if you like. You can now fold panel 1 under panel 2, so that you see the blue paper through the cellophane.
4. Make the strip of red paper just a little bit smaller than panel 3 (the smallest of the 4 panels) and tape the top half-inch or so of the popsicle stick to the red paper in the direction that gives you a really wide "popsicle". If you like you can draw dead fish on the red paper.
5. Cut a small notch, just big enough for the popsicle stick to fit through, in the middle of the crease between panels 3 and 4 and slide the popsicle stick through the notch so that the red paper hides under panel 3 when the popsicle stick is pulled as far out as it will go. Now, when you push on the popsicle stick, the blue Nile is covered with the red version.
6. You can now tape panel 4 to panel 1 under the river and tape up at least one of the sides to hold the contraption together. The kids thought it would be a good idea to leave one side untaped in case they needed to deal with any technical difficulties.
7. If you like you can decorate the top of panel 3 to look like the bank of the Nile and, if you've got time, supplies, and inclination, can make a Moses to stand there!

The Peaceable Kingdom

At Newtown Meeting, we have a special connection to Edward Hicks (1780-1849), who was a founding member of the meeting. His house is a 2-minute walk from our meeting, he's buried in our graveyard, replicas of his artwork hang in the social areas of our meetinghouse, and just a couple of blocks away is the Peaceable Kingdom playground. Over the years we've done a variety of First Day school activities related to Hicks and his "Peaceable Kingdom" paintings--it's a theme that children of all ages relate well to. This time, I printed out color copies (4 to a page) of 47 Peaceable Kingdom paintings. I created this pdf from photos available at the-athenaeum.org, a site dedicated to providing high resolution images of artwork in the public domain. I cut up the printouts so that I had 47 cards, each with a different Peaceable Kingdom painting.

During class, we spread the cards out face-down on the floor in the middle of the circle of children and asked each child to choose a card and look at it. We then told them they could keep turning over cards and trade the one they had chosen for another until they found one that they liked best. During this process children began to talk spontaneously about the pictures, noticing things like the fact that some initially looked identical, but when they looked more closely, there were some differences. When each child had a painting that s/he liked, we grouped the children in to pairs and asked each pair to find one more painting they liked so that between the two of them they would have three paintings. We then gave each pair a piece of newsprint and asked them to make two lists--one of things that they found in all three paintings and one of things that they found in just one painting. We also gave them the option of making a third list of things that were in just two of their paintings. When the groups finished we came back together, each group shared their list.

Finally, we went outside, looked at the graves of Edward Hicks and his relatives, and took a walk over to the Edward Hicks house, where we looked at the Newtown Heritage walk sign. A few of us also looked at the Newtown Heritage walk sign in front of our meeting house.
In this way, some pairs found things that they had originally missed. We asked questions about who that was with the native Americans in so many of the paintings. We read the words included as borders on some of the paintings to give us clues about what was going on. We asked about what the children knew about William Penn and the native Americans. We asked children to think about why Hicks might have put these two different scenes into one painting. We asked where he might have gotten the idea for all of those animals.  Eventually we got out Bibles and children took turns reading Isaiah 11:6-9. Then we looked for which of the things mentioned in these verses were in the paintings. At this point, we let each child select two or three cards to take home with them.

(The art department of the Concordia University of Chicago has a wonderful collection of art lessons for elementary school called  "Artists and the Art: Sharing Visual Stories". A lesson on Edward Hicks, with background information for teachers, is part of this collection. Philadelphia Yearly Meeting also has a Peaceable Kingdom curriculum.)

Valentines for All

Today we did our annual activity of making valentines for the meeting, which is always a hit for both the makers and the receivers. I bring in a few copies of a sheet with Bible verses about love and tell the children that the only requirement for their valentines is that they need to include one of these verses on each valentine. Some cut out and paste on the printed versions and some copy the verses by hand. (The formatting of the sheets is such that they can be printed on address labels, but I didn't have any on hand this year. Scissors and glue are a fine alternative.) Many children enjoy looking through and choosing verses they like. We've built up a stock of valentine-making supplies over the past several years of doing this project. (Essentials are some colored paper and glue. Other possibilities include tissue paper, pink index cards, colored card stock, stickers, ribbons, doilies, . . .  . This year one of the other first day school teachers had used a die cutter at her school to make lots of pre-cut heart shapes, which were a big hit.)

Since our First Day School program meets before meeting for worship, a couple of the children stand outside the meeting room door with a basket full of valentines and hand one to each person who comes in. Today the ministry was heavily influenced by the valentines and when one speaker read aloud the message on her valentine, my daughter leaned over and whispered, "I made that one!" It turned out to be a nice way of having the children feel connected to the ministry.

The Plague of Frogs

Today, after composing text messages from Moses to Zipporah, we acted out the first few scenes in a skit about Moses that I found at www.rotation.org's Ideas & Lesson Exchange. (Here's my differently formatted, abridged and slightly edited version.)

With each scene we switched the actors. Before doing the scene about the plague of frogs, we stopped to make lots of jumping frogs for the scene from 4 x 6 index cards (actually, brightly colored cardstock that I had sliced into 4 x 6 pieces). Once they got the hang of this, the children could have gone on much longer with the frog-making. (We probably spent about 25 minutes making frogs.) We did, however, manage to get in the plague of frogs scene just before we ran out of time.

Text Messages from Moses to Zipporah

After considering Moses and the burning bush last week, we started on the plagues this week. Because the two are so connected, we used this 10-minute activity to recap last week's story for those who hadn't been there. (The activity, though, would work well with almost any story.) I asked children who'd been present last week to tell the story to those who hadn't been with us, and for everyone to put themselves in Moses's sandals and try to imagine what it would have felt like to experience what he experienced. Their task after hearing the story would be to pretend they were Moses and to compose a text message that Moses might have sent to his wife, Zipporah, at the end of the experience. As you can see from the samples messages, the children enjoyed incorporating text-speak. (One person noted enthusiastically that he was not going to worry about spelling at all--and was even going to intentionally misspell--since spelling is not all that important when texting!) Most children read their messages aloud when we finished and there was much laughter. A few were inspired to include Zipporah's reply as well!

            

Turning a staff into a snake

Students pair off, and decide which one in the pair will be God and which will be Moses. Each Moses gets a toilet paper tube to serve as a staff and each God gets a piece of orange construction paper to serve as a flame. Read Exodus 3:1-12 and 4:1-17 and have students act out the story as you go. After acting out the story and giving an opportunity for students to react to it, give toilet paper tubes to the children who were playing God and move on to the activity of turning the staffs into snakes. For those students who finish early, suggest that they figure out a way to make a burning bush using construction paper and/or felt. (When we did this, the first student to work on a bush asked me for a cup, and then all the other bush makers wanted one, too, so our bushes involved cups.)

 

Materials

• one toilet paper tube per child, plus a couple of extras
• various colors of felt
• scissors
• glue
• (optional, but appreciated) a pair of googly eyes for each child
• construction paper (including several sheets of orange)
• (optional) paper or plastic cups to serve as a form for a bush