The tiredness of the early weeks of pregnancy really scuppered my plans for lots of 1 Peter teaching for the boys! Yes, lack of posting reflects the lack of playing on the word with the lads. Not great, but that’s real life!
It’s December already, which gives us a good opportunity to start something new! I’m 13 weeks pregnant now, so the exhaustion is beginning to lift – phew! There are tonnes of different advent teaching activities out there, but we’ve decided to do our own thing to make it as useful as possible for our boys. We’ve decided just to focus on the Christmas story and do one thing each week: Mary and the angel, Jesus is born, the shepherds, the wise men.
Mikey especially thrives on routine and repetition (what small child doesn’t?!) so doing exactly the same story for a whole week is great for him. We’ve rewritten it to include simple language – using words and actions that we know the boys like joining in with and we’ve kept it really, really short! We’re using our nativity set instead of pictures and will add new characters each week.
Here’s our story for this week, based on Luke 1:26-38.
Mary was surprised when she saw an angel in her house!
“Don’t worry!” said the angel, “God has exciting news especially for you!”
“For me?! No!” Said Mary with a smile.
“Yes! For you! God says you will have a baby. A special baby. God’s baby! Call him Jesus – ‘God to the rescue’!”
“Wow!” said Mary, “that’s amazing!”
As usual we finish with a prayer and today we had a little bit of cheering too!
We’ve also got an advent calendar and a set of boxes which I’ll fill with chocolate and we can open at tea time. So for the rest of the week we’re thinking about play linked to the coming of Jesus. Big themes I think we’ll focus on: waiting, rescue, excitement, surprise!
