After spending a little time catching up on the intertestimental history, we jumped into the New Testament. Since the 4 Gospels tell four sides of one story we've woven our way through all four books at once, rather than doing them one at a time.
The obvious place to start was with the birth of....John the Baptist. He's such an important part of the story of Jesus. We spent a week or two journeying through his life, beginning to end, before back-tracking to the birth of Jesus.
After the Christmas story and the story of young Jesus hanging out with the men at the temple, we cracked on with Jesus's ministry. Rather than taking the stories in order (which is no easy task, since the gospels don't always have the same order of events - which is not unusual for biographical writing at that time. Writers crafted biographies, not as a timeline of a person's life, but often with a theme or point to get across), anyway, rather than doing the stories in order of when they happened, we've taken the theme approach - miracles, healings, parables, etc. Along the way we've looked at the claims Jesus made about Himself and why they are important; as well as what it means to be a disciple of His.
In term 4 we teamed up with the Bright Sparks to prepare our annual Christmas presentation. Since we actually did the birth of Jesus this year, we thought it was finally time to do a Christmas play. Modifying an old skit, the children showed how all the trappings of Christmas can drown out what's really important - the fact that Jesus had arrived on Earth to save us.
The next few weeks, being the holidays, we'll take just the little ones out for playtime and a movie, while the primary kids stay in for the sermon (don't forget we have a bunch of sermon helps & worship tools for the kids (and adults) to use during the service.
The obvious place to start was with the birth of....John the Baptist. He's such an important part of the story of Jesus. We spent a week or two journeying through his life, beginning to end, before back-tracking to the birth of Jesus.
After the Christmas story and the story of young Jesus hanging out with the men at the temple, we cracked on with Jesus's ministry. Rather than taking the stories in order (which is no easy task, since the gospels don't always have the same order of events - which is not unusual for biographical writing at that time. Writers crafted biographies, not as a timeline of a person's life, but often with a theme or point to get across), anyway, rather than doing the stories in order of when they happened, we've taken the theme approach - miracles, healings, parables, etc. Along the way we've looked at the claims Jesus made about Himself and why they are important; as well as what it means to be a disciple of His.
In term 4 we teamed up with the Bright Sparks to prepare our annual Christmas presentation. Since we actually did the birth of Jesus this year, we thought it was finally time to do a Christmas play. Modifying an old skit, the children showed how all the trappings of Christmas can drown out what's really important - the fact that Jesus had arrived on Earth to save us.
The next few weeks, being the holidays, we'll take just the little ones out for playtime and a movie, while the primary kids stay in for the sermon (don't forget we have a bunch of sermon helps & worship tools for the kids (and adults) to use during the service.