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Wednesday, March 7, 2012

Jesus in the Wilderness

My prayer group is doing a Lenten studying using THIS great book. Last week our focus was on Jesus in the Wilderness. I had been reading about the concept of Godly Play (basically using Bible stories and creating manipulatives for children to act out the stories on their own) and knew this story would be perfect for our first go at trying Godly Play and using it to teach some concepts about Jesus' love for us.

We found a recipe for sand dough online and made it together outside. It turned out super neat! We'll definitely do it again.....We used an old board for our base and built the wilderness/desert. Of course we knew we had to have hills and some rocks, and Q wanted to add some rosemary sprigs, so we did! I googled a picture of the desert where Jesus went just to have an idea in my mind before we started creating.....
It took 24 hours to dry.

Meanwhile I rounded up some wood scraps and woodburned the other objects we needed.
A temple:

An angel
Jesus
And the black piece is satan.

And one of the gospel accounts says Jesus was alone with the wild beasts, and I did a little research to see what this most likely meant, and it said there were wild lions roaming the desert at this time, so I chose to make a lion.

We have been reading the story in 3 different collections--two children's story Bibles and one actual version of the Bible--the International Children's Version.

Then we have used the little pieces to act out the story. It's interesting how many times this week the concepts have come up in other areas for me.

For example I had explained early in the week for Q what "Man shall not live on bread alone" means, and in my Tuesday Bible Study we watched a Kay Arthur video and she talked about how it can't be an option to find time to spend with God. We HAVE to do it. She said we can't let daily life "things" get in the way, and she referenced this scripture and reminded us not to try and live on the "daily bread." Wow....so this little story is serving to be very impactful at our house this week.
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