Creation Collage

I think spring is a great time to be learning about how God created the earth!

We have had tons of fun every morning with our Creation Bean Bags, and reading and singing about God's handiwork. And after all that, we sat down every morning to work on our lovely creation collage. I was hoping to give you day-by-day pictures, but I have been having some camera issues, so can only share with you the end result:

For the background we used a large, very thick cardboard circle, and every day we added collage elements according to the particular day of Creation we were studying.

Not bad facial features for a 33 month old! Old Adam could maybe have looked a little more pleased with his newly acquired help meet, though! Sweetpea says the green is their hair. 

The sea is tin foil glued onto the board, and then painted over. Sweetpea liked painting on the textured, wrinkled foil.

Our moon is the top of a baby powder bottle. And it has a story: Late one Monday afternoon I was dreamily stirring a pot of something on the stove and relishing the fact that our house was so lovely and clean after a hard day of cleaning. I was right in the middle of savouring that thought when Sweetpea tugged at my skirt and said: "Mamma, I think you should come see what ArrowBoy is doing with the powder."

He had taken the cap off with his teeth and dumped the entire bottle of baby powder on Sweetpea's bedroom carpet. By the time I arrived, they have had a chance to walk around a bit, and I only had to follow the little white footprints down the carpeted passage to find the scene of the crime. Powder in our hair, on our clothes, in our library books... But how can anyone be upset about a mess that smells so great?!

These clouds used to be much fluffier...but thenArowBoy got a hold of them and...well, ate them. Yes. That's my boy: Little Cloud Eater. Sounds like the name of an Indian Brave, doesn't it?! *Giggles*

Sweetpea really enjoyed working on this and couldn't wait for her brother to go for his nap every morning so we could get into it! (For obvious reasons! We just forgot to put it out of his way when he woke up on that day we did the clouds...!) And when Daddy came home for lunch, she very excitedly showed off her latest addition to the picture. I found it a fun and concrete way to teach the subject.



How we use our creation bean bags

One of our favourite CD's is The Singing Bible that I ordered from Focus on the Family two Christmasses ago. Sweetpea was still a bit young then and the snippets of narration between the songs didn't appeal to her then, but I took it out again a few months ago, and now it is requested daily!

The Singing Bible

(South African readers: Click on the link above to order from Kalahari.net)

The set consists of four CD's that tell the story of the Bible from Genesis to Revelation through song and short bits of narration that tie it all together. My favourite things about this set are, firstly, the message of God's love that runs through all the songs like a golden thread, and secondly, the wide variety of music genres that were used.

One of our favourite songs is track three on the first CD, called God made the Universe! and since we've been learning about the wonderful way in which God created the world in six days, I decided to use this song as a starting point for our learning. To make it more concrete and visual, I made six felt 'pockets' for our bean bags - one for each day of the Creation story. If you missed the post earlier this week, you can click here to see how I made them.

So here is how we play:

First we read the Creation Story from the Children's Bible each morning.

Then I bring out the appropriate bean bag for that day and we discuss the picture on it.

Then it is music time! Although we sing the whole song through every morning, on the first morning we only played with the Day One bean bag. Whenever the words: "Day One - God made the night and the day!" were sung, Sweetpea and I would toss the bean bag to each other, and then continue with the actions we made up for the chorus. The following day we added the Day Two bean bag, the next day the Day Three one, an so on. As the number of bean bags increase, so does the fun, and we usually end up in an exhausted, giggling heap from trying to catch and toss all the bags!

We have also played with these by lining the bags up in a row on our living room floor, and as each day is called out in the song, we would hop over to the appropriate bag - lovely gross motor fun on less-than-perfect spring days!

Creation bean bags

      We have been doing a lot of fun activities around the Creation Story lately and to make it more concrete and visual, I made up a set of six Creation Bean Bags that we have been using in many exciting ways!

   To make the pouches, I cut strips of blue felt a little wider than our bean bags, and sewed the sides closed, leaving a little flap at the back, to which I sewed a plastic press-stud. The pictures were glued down with fabric glue and left to dry under a stack of heavy phone directories overnight.

    I used some of the heavy duty bean bags that I sell. They are made from sturdy bull denim, and filled with PVC pellets instead of real beans. This means they can be washed in a normal washing machine (a great benefit if you have children like mine who seem to learn about their world primarily through their sense of taste!!). Also, beans and lentils can get moldy - no such problem with the plastic pellets!

   So I just slip the bean bags into their felt pouches for the duration of our Creation 'theme', and can then put them away until later ( I will store them with our felt board themes - you can click here to see how I keep our felt themes together in a tidy, 'compact' way!)

Here are close-ups of the bean bags for each day:

(CANNOT. GET. PHOTOS. TO. UPLOAD. CORRECTLY. 

 I appologise for the pictures that are on their sides. I have tried and tried to get them right side up, but to no avail.)

    

    

GAME IDEAS:

1. We played a silly bean bag toss game while we listened to the song God made the Universe from our The Singing Bible CD - more about this in another post later this week.

2. Make a masking tape grid with six squares on the living room floor. Place paper plates that are numbered 1 to 6 in each square. Place the bean bags in a line at your child's feet. As you call out the number of the day, she must pick the correct square and toss the bag onto the plate in that square!

3. On the first morning that we used these, I presented them in a 'lesson' similar to the Montessori Godly Play style. Click here for a video that shows how to go about this.

*Please note: you could also make a seventh bag with nothing on it to show that God rested on the seventh day. I only had six bean bags, so whenever we spoke about the seventh day, we would stretch out dramatically and say: "On day Seven, God rested in Heaven!" *

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