Mary, Joseph and Jesus

Our story this week is based on Luke 2:1-7 and Matthew 1:25.

Mikey has really engaged with the repeated sentences about the baby and the “Jesus – God to the rescue!” phrase. They’re key to the message so we’ve decided to repeat them each week.

Mary and Joseph walked and walked and walked and walked (sigh!) to Bethlehem.

Mary had her baby. A special baby. God’s baby.

Joseph said, “his name is Jesus – God to the rescue!”

Short but sweet is working for us. Obviously there is lots we’ve missed. I’ve tried to include only things I think the boys will have a chance of understanding and I don’t want to distract their attention by making it too long or by telling them non-essential information. But what do you think? What would you keep and what would you leave out when retelling the Christmas story to your kids?

Mary & Gabriel

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!

hooray!

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!

So preparation done (see previous post), what shall we play?
Well I think the process I’m going through with the boys is this:
What belongs to you? → You belong to me → We belong to God

So, “what belongs to you?” play:

Matching items to Dan and Mikey – use stickers with the boys pictures and names (ones [...]

This Sunday marks the relaunch of Wellfield and our first day with our new church family! It also means a new Sunday club series for Mikey. This term it’s 1 Peter.
1 Peter sounded like a great idea until I sat down to read it to work out how to teach it to the boys!! It’s [...]

We’re about to join our church’s plant. It’s such an exciting time but for me, totally new! I’ve never been part of ’small church’ and have got pretty used to being able to sit back and relax (complacent, moi? Well, oui actually!).
One of the new things for us is having one teaching group for all [...]

Just to say I WILL get back to regular blogging soon. Summer has caused many things to fall by the wayside. But in true ‘back to school’ fashion, September marks a fresh start. I’ll be sharing with you some more ideas, some plans Dave has had for a year plan and I will start sharing [...]


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