God Will Provide A Lamb

I’ve been working on writing a lesson about Isaac and Abraham for our Awana survey of the Old Testament.

(I think I am benefitting as much as, or more than, the Awana kids, by putting together these lessons!)

What keeps going through my head is the last chorus of Michael Card’s song about God testing Abraham by asking him to sacrifice his son, his only son, Isaac, whom he loves.  You can read the whole story for yourself in Genesis 22, but here is the song:

 

Three days journey to the sacred place

A boy and a man with a sorrowful face

Tortured yet faithful to God’s command

To take the life of his son in his own hands.

God will provide a lamb

To be offered up in your place

A sacrifice so spotless and clean

To take all your sin away.

Here’s wood and fire, where the sacrifice?

The questioning voice and the innocent eyes

Is the son of laughter who you’ve waited for

To die like a lamb to please the Lord?

God will provide a lamb

To be offered up in your place

A sacrifice so spotless and clean

To take all your sin away.

A gleaming knife, an accepted choice

A rush of wind and an angel’s voice

A ram in the thicket, caught by its horns

And a new age of trusting the Lord is born.

For God has provided a lamb

He was offered up in your place

What Abraham was asked to do, He’s done

He’s offered His only son!

What Abraham was asked to do, He’s done

He’s offered His only son!

 

I LOVE how Michael Card concludes this song – What Abraham was asked to do, GOD did – HE offered His only son, whom He loved – Jesus – in *my* place, to take all *my* sin away.

 

By the way, if you’ve never listened to Michael Card, I HIGHLY recommend his music.  Not only is he an excellent musician, but he is a serious student (and teacher) of the Bible.  His songs are so saturated in the Word of God, and he makes the stories, events, and people come alive.  He has done an album on almost every book or group of books in the Bible: the Law, the Writings (Psalms, Proverbs, Job, etc.), the Prophets, the Life of Jesus, The letters of Paul, Hebrews, the life of Peter, Revelation.  And I just found out he has albums on Matthew, Mark, and Luke too.  I first began listening to his music when I was a teenager, and now I can hardly read the Bible without being reminded of one of his songs.  Especially in the Old Testament songs, he is so good at connecting it to the New Testament (as in the song above) and making a powerful application to *my* life.

Passover Unit Study

The past two weeks, we have been learning about the 10 plagues God sent on Egypt and about Passover.

We learned about 2 plagues each day. We read the applicable Bible passage from Exodus, sang the appropriate part of the Ten Plagues Song (sung to the tune of “This Old Man”). 

In case you don’t remember the plagues in order, here they are:

1. Water turned to blood

2. Frogs

3. Gnats (or lice)

4. Flies

5. Livestock dies

6. Boils

7. Hail

8. Locusts

9. Darkness

10. Firstborn dies

The two older kids were assigned a verse to copy on special plague paper and a corresponding coloring page.

 

The two younger kids had corresponding preschool level activities (dot-to-dot, coloring, trace the lines, pre-writing skills, etc.)

For plague 1, trace the waves with a red marker….

 

For plague 2, a dot-to-dot of a frog…

For plague 3, make dots on the page to represent gnats or lice.

For plague 4, count the flies, circle the number, draw a line from the number to the correct group of flies.  I was amazed at how well Brian did this page!

 

For plague 5, a dot-to-dot of a cow…

 

Jeffrey’s man completely covered with boils from head to toe.  I think this was his favorite activity!

 

I also tried to make some kind of snack or treat each day to go along with one of the plagues we learned about.

 

Nile water… (colored with a bit of strawberry juice)

 

Frog pancakes…

I was going to stick frog pictures in their beds, pajamas, etc. before they went to get ready for bed, but I forgot.  Maybe next year!

 

Cupcakes covered with gnats or lice or flies, take your pick…

(baking chocolate grated over cupcakes with cream cheese icing)

 

“Cow Pie Pudding” (chocolate pudding with crushed graham crackers and chocolate chips)

 

Heather made a cloud and lightning out of pattern blocks:

 

locust cakes:

 

A play-dough house, painted with “blood” on the doorposts and lentil

   

(Thanks to Church House Collection for coloring pages, writing paper, and snack ideas.)

 

 

On Passover night (March 25) we had a Passover celebration with Ronnie’s family.

Grandpa Russell spoke about the origins of “Easter” and how it differs from the biblical Passover.

Grandma Russell explained the different elements in the modern Jewish Seder. (And there is Elaine talking to her cousin Hadassah.)

After our meal, Uncle Adam and Aunt Janet went through the 10 plagues, with some “visual” aids for each one.  I didn’t get a picture of all of them, but here are a few…

Frogs and livestock…

 

 

Boils…

 

 

Hail (marble-size)…

 

Locusts…

 

And painting the doorposts with “blood”…

       

 

But it is not enough to just talk about the plagues and the first Passover.  God commanded the Jews to remember the Passover every year for all their generations, forever.  Jesus celebrated the Passover, and in fact was our Passover lamb. As John the Baptist said, “Behold the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world."  The Jews celebrated Passover to remember how God saved them from slavery to the Egyptians.  We celebrate Passover to remember (and to proclaim) how God saves us from slavery to sin.

Ronnie presented a PowerPoint slide show about the last supper (Passover) that Jesus celebrated, and about Jesus’ death, burial and resurrection.

 

At home, we made a “Resurrection Garden” thanks to an idea at Home School Creations.

First we soaked some wheat berries and “planted” them on our “garden tomb.”

 

By the next morning, they had started to sprout…

 

This is what it looked like on Day 4…

Day 5…

   

On the night of Passover, we sealed up the tomb…

After three days and three nights… “He is not here.  He is risen, just as he said!”

  

 

We also made “Resurrection Rolls”.

The dough represents the tomb…

The marshmallow represents Jesus’ body and the butter and cinnamon sugar represent the oil and spices used to anoint his body for burial…

Ready to bake…

and ready to eat…

The marshmallows were supposed to melt and “disappear” to represent the empty tomb.  They didn’t quite.  I think my dough might have been too thick.

(Thanks to Travis for most of the pictures of the rolls.)

Weather Forecasting Unit Study

We actually started this one before the one about bees.  And finished it later.  Travis wanted to know how to predict the weather, so….

BOOKS

I love being able to go online to our county library website, search their catalog, reserve books, and request them to be put on hold for me.  Saves me a lot of time searching the shelves – especially with 5 helpers in tow…

As usual, the Gail Gibbons books are great..

A basic one about what meteorologists do..

 

Meteorologists (Community Helper Series)

by Sandra J. Christan

 

 

 

 

A more advanced one …. we didn’t quite get through all of this one.

 

 

Doppler Radar, Satellites, and Computer Models

by Paul Fleisher

 

 

 

 

 

 

Just for fun, because my kids like to tell me jokes…

 

Wacky Weather and Silly Season Jokes

by Melissa Stewart

 

 

 

 

 

 

A good book with simple, basic experiments.  We did several of them (see below) before running out of attention span.

 

Weather with step-by-step projects for the young scientist

by Sally Hewitt

 

 

 

 

A really good book (good enough to order our own copy, though it was hard to find).  A bit advanced for my age group, but it did have some good experiments and I think it will be even more useful in few more years.

 

 

The Kids’ Book of Weather Forecasting

by Mark Breen

 

 

 

And a good website that Travis explored for a while …

www.weather.gov

EXPERIMENTS

One experiment in the Sally Hewitt book was to make a wind detector by tying pieces of paper of different weights to a stick.  A light breeze will only blow the lightest paper (tissue paper) and a stronger breeze will blow the cardboard.

It was really windy the day we tried it out, so we decided it would be a good time to have another go at…

…flying kites… about two and a half of them worked this time…

 

Another experiment was a barometer.  I didn’t really expect this to work, but it did!!  As the air pressure goes up, it pushes down on the balloon stretched over the can, which makes the toothpick pointer go up.  And vice versa.   These pictures were taken on three consecutive days.  If you look closely, you can see that we had to draw an extra higher line.  The next couple of days after this, it dropped dramatically – and, sure enough, we had clouds and rain!

  

 

This was actually the first experiment that we did back in January. I learned a new word with this one: anemometer.  It measures wind speed.  Travis build this one.

 

Just before we had the rain, I bought a rain gauge and set it up in our back yard…we got 4/10 of an inch.

We did the “cloud in a bottle” experiment: put hot water in a jar for a few seconds, pour out half, and put an ice cube or ice pack over the top.  Water vapor condenses and makes it look a little bit cloudy in the jar.

We also measured the temperature in the shade and in the sun several days to see the difference.

 

SUMMARIZING WHAT WE LEARNED

We put together this display board to summarize what we’ve learned about weather…

 

I made the outline for the title and Jeffrey and Brian filled it in.  They both did a great job tracing inside the lines, for their ages and abilities.

 

We listed the 5 “ingredients” for weather and the tools used to measure them. I am proud of  Travis and Heather for doing all the drawings on their own!

  

We kept a weather log and observed some weather “rules”:

• A rising barometer means good weather.
• A falling barometer means bad weather.
• High humidity makes you feel hotter.  This is called heat index.
• Wind makes you feel colder.  This is called wind chill.

 

We looked briefly at how to read a weather map…

 

  

 

And copied some verses from the Bible about rain.

Proverbs 17:15 A constant dripping on a day of steady rain and a contentious woman are alike.

 

  Job 28:25-27

²⁵ “When He [God] imparted weight to the wind
And meted out the waters by measure,
²⁶ When He set a limit for the rain
And a course for the thunderbolt,
²⁷ Then He saw it and declared it;
He established it and also searched it out.

 

A major accomplishment : Jeffrey drew a picture on his own, cheerfully!  There are two orange dinosaurs flying kites in a rain storm.  The wind is so strong that the one on the left is getting lifted into the air.

 

Mommy drew this one at Brian’s dictation…