Search Results for: Joseph

My *plans* for Advent

Posted on by

This week I’m scurrying about to finishing prepping for the Advent activities I have planned for December.  Since we put our Long Story Short devotions on hold before Thanksgiving and are planning to do Truth in the Tinsel starting next week, I was at a loss as far as how to fill our evening Bible Time this week.  Then, at long last, the answer arrived in the mail. Old Story New is Marty Machowski’s sequel to Long Story Short, going through 78 stories of the New Testament and pointing to the gospel through each one.  As an introduction to Advent, I decided to use the first week from Old Story New, on “The Birth of Jesus Foretold.”  (Then it will go on the shelf for another year or so while we finish up with Long Story Short.)  That should take us right through the last day of November, and then we’re diving in!

For the last couple years the boys have enjoyed opening the doors on our wooden Advent calendar and sticking the magnetic pieces on the picture of the stable.  This year I’m planning to do that each morning and to also read from Advent Storybook: 24 Stories to Share Before Christmas.  I also plan to make our Truth in the Tinsel ornaments during the day and then present them to Daddy each night, using the readings for Bible Time. (The boys can’t wait to start this. They’re enjoying falling asleep to the glow of the 4-foot tree with colored lights I set up in their room, and they’re eager to decorate it!)

Finally, we have SO many Christmas books, I was afraid they would all end up in a basket and we would never get to most of them because the boys would keep choosing only their favorites.  So I decided to present them with one each day, which we will read before putting it into our basket.  My sister-in-law’s family introduced me to the idea of cloth gift bags, so I plan use one to let them “unwrap” a book each day in December.  Many of our books coordinated with the topics from Truth in the Tinsel, so I wrote up a list of all twenty-four days and selected books that would be appropriate.  For some days there weren’t any good matches, so I used those as a chance to get in some favorites that wouldn’t fit anywhere else.  For a couple days I included two, either because they were simple board books or because I couldn’t decide.  (Yes, I am a bookaholic, though I only purchased a few this year.  Most were treasures I’d picked up at used book stores, gifts, books I bought last year, or oldies either from my childhood or passed on from Grandma’s Kindergarten after retirement.) I haven’t even read some of the new ones yet, but I’m excited to share them all with my children this year.  Here’s what we’ll be reading up through Christmas (books in parentheses have nothing to do with the topic of the day):

  1. Light – The Light of Christmas by Dandi Daley Mackall and A Star for Jesus by Crystal Bowman
  2. Kingdom – (The Legend of St. Nicholas: A Story of Christmas Giving by Dandi Daley Mackall)
  3. Zechariah – (The Year of the Perfect Christmas Tree by Gloria Houston)
  4. Gabriel – (Mortimer’s Christmas Manger by Karma Wilson)
  5. Mary – Baby Jesus is Born by Juliet David
  6. Mary/Elizabeth – Mary’s Treasure Box by Carolyn Walz Kramlich
  7. Song – Song of the Stars by Sally Lloyd-Jones
  8. Sun – (The Light of Christmas by Richard Paul Evans)
  9. Joseph – Jacob’s Gift by Max Lucado
  10. Dream – (Mouskin’s Christmas Eve by Edna Miller)
  11. Jesus’ Name – Jesus, Me and My Christmas Tree by Crystal Bowman
  12. Census – The Innkeeper’s Daughter by Jill Briscoe
  13. Bethlehem – Oh Come, Little Children by Anita Reith Stohs
  14. Stable – This is the Stable by Cynthia Cotton and Tell Me the Christmas Story by Joni Walker
  15. Manger – Christmas in the Manger by Nola Buck and The Last Straw by Paula Palangi
  16. Clothes – “The Christmas Spider“ by Marguerite de Angeli, in an anthology called I Love Christmas (The spider’s web covers Baby Jesus. I think it’s a similar story to The Little Spider by Sigmund Brouwer)
  17. Sheep – The Crippled Lamb by Max Lucado
  18. Angels – Christmas Angels by Crystal Bowman
  19. Shepherd – The Littlest Shepherd by Ron Mehl, Jr.
  20. Temple – Angela and the Baby Jesus by Frank McCourt
  21. Star – The Christmas Star by Marcus Pfister
  22. Wise Men – We Three Kings traditional carol illustrated by Gennady Spirin
  23. Gifts – Baboushka and the Three Kings by Ruth Robbins
  24.  Cross – The Candymaker’s Gift: The Inspirational Legend of the Candy Cane by David and Helen Haidle and J is for Jesus by Crystal Bowman

Just as a final note: these are my plans.  This is pretty much all we’re doing for school through Christmas, aside from some Christmas music.  Knowing how things go, this probably won’t all happen the way I’m envisioning it.  But I have a plan, and that’s always a good place to start, right? 🙂

Merry Christmas!

UPDATE: Each year I’ve tweaked this list a little as I’ve found books that fit the daily themes better.  Also, as my kids got older, our library grew and I divided the books for older and younger ones.  For more age-specific suggestions, check out my posts “25 CHRISTmas Books for Preschooler” and “25 CHRISTmas books for Older Children.”

Posted in Bible lessons, Parenting Resources

Index of Bible lessons

Posted on by

Preschool Bible Lessons

Here’s a list through the Bible, when Ian was three, turning four.  The indented bold ones were from our second time through, starting when he was four and a half and Elijah was two and a half and going until he finished “preschool”:

Once Ian started Kindergarten, we needed a routine that fit well into our school schedule.  I described what a week of Bible lessons looked like in my post “One Year Into Long Story Short.”  At that point I stopped posting regularly about our Bible lessons because we pretty much just followed that plan every week.  Unless that changes, I’ll probably only be posting when I come across something really helpful that I want to remember with regards to a particular Bible story.

Posted in Index

Wise and Foolish Builders

Posted on by

This was one of those weeks that just didn’t turn out quite the way I planned it.  But that’s okay.  I’m learning to go with the flow and grab those teachable moments.

Our Bible lesson was from ABC Jesus Loves Me 3-Year Old Curriculum Week 21: the wise man who built his house upon the rock and his foolish counterpart (found in Matthew 7:24-27).  For literature, I thought we’d spend some time with the Three Little Pigs, since the stories fit so well together.  My main objective was for Ian to associate being “wise” with doing things God’s way (which often means being patient), and being “foolish” means just doing whatever we want.  For a memory verse I wanted to begin working on Proverbs 1:7 “The fear of the LORD is the beginning of knowledge; fools despise wisdom and instruction.”  That was the plan anyway.

But things happen.

#1.  I forgot to put the memory verse on our iPod playlist. Plus, Ian enjoyed LAST week’s playlist so much, that was all he really wanted to listen to. So while I tried to spend time listening to this week’s lesson, I figured I’d go with his interest.  After all, he’s going to hear this Bible story many times over the course of his life.

#2. We finally got to have a playdate with some of our good friends.  So we lost a day there.

#3. We discovered ReadingEggs.com (more to come on this one!)  We lost most of Thursday morning to this, but I have to say it was time well spent as by the end of it, Ian had read his first sight words!

#4. We decided to use our tickets to Ian’s favorite children’s museum, which are only good through the end of the month.  So there goes Friday as well.

We did spend a little time on the Three Little Pigs.  We read the classic story from English Fairy Tales collected by Joseph Jacobs (great for learning to just listen and FREE for Kindle), as well as a simple mini-book from Scholastic. The boys also enjoyed a free storybook app on my Kindle Fire and listened to the story on a CD from the library read by Holly Hunter.  Ian especially got a kick out of The Three Little Wolves and the Big Bad Pig by Eugene Trivisas.

There were a number of ideas at Making Learning Fun (tracing numbers, mazes, concentration cards, etc.), but the closest I got to any of them was introducing Ian to cuisinaire rods, which I loved playing with as a child.  They are a great tool for building “number sense,” and I hope to use them in many different ways in the future.  My goal this week was to help him get familiar with them and be able to do at least part of this addition activity, but alas…

I don’t want to linger on this lesson (it’s such a short passage of Scripture and the meaning is too abstract for Ian to really grasp anyway), so we’ll just move on next week and work on being more intentional about focusing on the Bible.

Posted in ABCJesusLovesMe, Bible lessons, Literature Units, Preschool

The Angel Visits Mary

Posted on by

This isn’t traditionally the time of year the church celebrates the Annunciation (the angel Gabriel announcing to Mary that she was going to conceive Jesus), but since we’re in full “expecting a baby” mode, and a few weeks seem like at least nine months when you’re only three years old, it seemed like a good time for a Bible lesson on getting ready for Baby Jesus.  I figure we talk about waiting for Jesus, spend some time on Thanksgiving, and then voila!  Arianna arrives and we can soak in the joy of the Christmas season.  I’m not playing Christmas carols yet, but boy I’m looking forward to it!

I introduced the story to Ian with the flannel board set as I read Luke 1:26-38 from my Bible.  It definitely triggered a memory with him, but it still seemed new enough to be exciting.  He was so curious about the story, I decided to show him the clip from The Nativity Story where Gabriel comes to Mary.  He wanted to watch more, so we jumped to the end when Jesus was born and the shepherds and wise men arrived.  Ian was so excited by the whole scene.  He kept saying, “He’s so cute!  I wish we could go and see Him!”  I think his excitement was more about the tiny baby than the fact that it was Jesus, so I said, “Well, God’s sending us Arianna soon, so we’ll get to hold her instead.”  He wanted to make sure we had a blanket to wrap her in like the one Joseph and Mary wrapped around Jesus in the film.  There are plenty of scenes in the movie that Ian’s not ready to see, so we won’t be watching the whole thing this year, but just seeing those two scenes was very powerful and seemed to really affect him.

I was surprised to find that two of our storybook Bibles didn’t contain any mention of the angel coming to Mary.  We read it in The Beginner’s Bible (by Karyn Henley), and of course Ian didn’t want to stop there.  I was trying to save the birth of Jesus and the shepherd’s visit for December, but I decided not to fight him on it.  After all, with a newborn in the house, who knows how often I’ll get to sit down with him and talk about it!  We also read the story in Classic Bible Stories: A Family Treasury, which was accompanied by a beautiful illustration (my favorite thing about this book).

Our Bible verse is Luke 1:37 “For nothing is impossible with God.” (This had been the Bible verse assigned to the lesson on Daniel in ABC Jesus Loves Me Week 17, but I’d gone with a different one.  Since it actually comes from this story, it seemed like good time to use it!).  As suggested in ABCJLM, we sang it to the tune of “London Bridge”:

For nothing is impossible with God, impossible with God, impossible with God.  For nothing is impossible with God. Luke 1:37

I was kind of surprised I couldn’t find any songs in my library that went with the memory verse to include in our iPod playlist for the week.  Here’s what we did listen to (short list this week!):

Posted in Bible lessons, Preschool
Recent Entries »