Story of the World: Chapters 5 & 6

Life has been a little crazy around here this week between the 4th of July and preparing for the kids' art class I'm teaching next week.  So here's a combined post for The Story of the World and Episcopal Children's Curriculum (EEC).  Chapter 6 of SOTW tells the story of Joseph, which tied into our EEC unit, so we studied them together.

Story of the World: Chapter 5
This chapter tells the story of Sargon, the first Sumerian dictator.  Sargon united Sumer and renamed it Akkadia.  Chapter 5 was very short and none of the suggested crafts particularly appealed to us, so we skipped them.

Books
The Golden Sandal - a Cinderella story set in Mesopotamia



Videos
Ancient Civilizations for Children: Ancient Mesopotamia (With Teacher's Guide) [VHS]

Activities
Sumerian Inventions Word Search - found in the Activity Guide


Story of the World Chapter 6 and EEC Shell Year Unit 1: Sections 5 & 6

Books
Joseph - this is a BEAUTIFULLY illustrated bible story
Dance, Sing, Remember : A Celebration of Jewish Holidays - introduces Jewish holidays and includes some accompanying activities

  

Videos
Joseph - King of Dreams


Craft
Crazy Bug made a many colored dream t-shirt using spray on fabric paint. This was a good lesson in "less is more" because the more spray that was added the muddier the colors became.  We're going to try it again this summer using only closely related colors like red, purple, and blue.


We've also been checking our Chicken Mummy and changing his salt mixture regularly.  He's already dried out a lot!

Jacob's Dream

Here is our project for lessons 3 & 4 of ECC:

I combined lessons 3 and 4 for two really sound pedagogical reasons: I thought 3 was boring and I couldn't find a good craft to go with it!  I searched and searched for a good craft for lesson 4 and finally came across this printable from New Church Vineyard.

Crazy Bug colored Jacob and the ladder, cut them out, and glued them to blue construction paper.  Then I helped her do a Google image search for angels.  She adores printing things off the computer, which I rarely let her due because colored ink costs so much.  I copied and pasted the images onto a Word doc, then adjusted their sizes so they all fit on about 1/2 a page.  We printed them out and Crazy Bug cut them out and glued them around the ladder.  Finally, for a heavenly touch, we added extra fine, clear glitter to the angels, ladder, and air.  (I love extra fine, clear plastic glitter!  It matches any project, looks more classy then regular glitter, and doesn't seem to leave the same kind of mess all over your house!)

Next up in EEC: Joseph and his coat of many colors.  Stop by next week to check it out!

Noah, His Ark, and Father Abraham

Here are our bible crafts for lessons 1& 2 of ECC!

Noah's Ark

This project was actually suggested in the curriculum.  The rainbow is a sign of God's promise to humanity, so we made a big rainbow collage.

1.  Take a piece of poster board and sketch a large rainbow on it.  (I was neurotic and actually used a ruler so all the colors would be the same width.  But feel free to freehand it!)

2.  Collect all the craft or could-be-craft supplies in your house and start sorting by color.  We used feathers, foam shapes, pom-poms, dyed pasta, fabric flower petals, etc.  Start gluing them on to the appropriate rows.  (By the way, if you don't have a good, strong, fast drying glue, I'd highly recommend Beacons 3-in-1 Craft Glue.  It's a liquid glue that dries as strong as hot glue!  Keep an eye on it though - it took the finish off my coffee table!)

3.  If you've run out of materials and it still looks wimpy, add stickers to any empty spots.  AC Moore usually has great tablets of 500-1000 stickers for $1 each.

4.  You can just print "Promise" above it or print the quote "I have set my bow in the clouds and it shall be a sign of the covenant between me and the earth." (Genesis 9:13)


Abraham and Sarah

God promised to make Abraham's descendants as many as the stars in the sky.  So we made beautiful "stained glass" stars.

1.  Cut a star out of cardstock, poster board, or a cereal box.

2.  Use a hot glue gun to make thick lines of glue across the star in various directions.  These will be "metal" between the colors of glass.

3.  Glue aluminum foil to the star with white glue or a glue stick.  Fold the edges around the back of the star.

4.  Use Sharpies to color the areas between the glue ridges.  (Fat, marker-like Sharpies work much better than ultra-fine point ones.)

Thump-Free Bible Curriculum

 
Let me just state now that I'm a liberal Episcopalian from Massachusetts.  I support gay marriage.  I support birth control.  And bible thumping makes me very nervous.

But that doesn't mean I'm not a Christian.  I want my daughter to have a relationship with God, a strong sense of right and wrong, knowledge of the bible, and an understanding of our religion.  With that in mind, I set off to find an appropriate religious curriculum.  It was a scary journey.



I finally narrowed it down to three curricula widely used by the Episcopal church: Catechism of the Good Shepherd, Godly Play, and Episcopal Children's Curriculum.  The first two are Montessori based and require fancy materials.  And so I turned to the Episcopal Children's Curriculum published by Virginia Theological Seminary.  ECC is available, in its entirety, online and free of charge.  It has lots of options for each lesson including activities sheets, cut and paste crafts, more creative crafts, and serious bible study.  It covers bible stories, prayer, sacraments, Episcopal liturgy, and more.  For non-Episcopalians it could be easily adapted by skipping the "church" units to focus on the bible units.  My daughter loves it because each lesson has a collectible review card to accompany it, and she'll do anything that allows her to collect stuff.  And did I mention it's free?

The only problems I've found is with the crafts.  Crazy Bug and I are Serious Arts-and-Crafts People.  So I've scoured the internet and my own brain and added our own thematic crafts.  We're currently using the Shell Year of the Primary curriculum.  I'll share the crafts here as we create them.