homeschool preschool: bible lessons-part 1

After having such fun last year doing our ABC Preschool I wanted to have a homeschool preschool day again this year.  Gus desperately wants to go to real school but I was trying to hold off until after Christmas since I don't really want him to go at all.  I got two friends with young kids to agree to joining our preschool day.  Since Gus is older than most of the kids and is already reading, I wanted to figure out something that would work for all the age levels we were dealing with.  What I came up with was Bible Stories.  With a few exceptions for holidays we decided to work our way through the Bible telling the stories in an interactive way and doing crafts.  Here is the rundown for the first half of the year...

THE CREATION STORY

We put the numbers 1 to 7 on the wall and for each of the seven days each kid colored something to remind them of the day.

Then they took their creations to the wall and taped them near the correct number...

Then we had a creation story snack mix with a different snack for each day...

They all had so much fun and we all knew this idea was going to work well for all these cute kiddos...

 ADAM AND EVE
For the Adam and Eve story I found some printable stick puppets to help tell the story.

Two mom's acted it out while the other mom read the story.  We used a baby Elsie to be the angel at the end.  Since she was holding a sword, the boys thought it was hilarious.

The kids loved it so much that they all wanted to take turns acting out again.  Then we did a snake craft...

Then we put out bowls of lots of different kinds of fruit with a bowl of apples in the middle.  We told them we didn't want them to eat the apples and if they didn't there would be a reward at the end.  One of the boys was a little traumatized by this because he really wanted apples.  We tried to explain obedience, etc, but we aren't sure the lesson fully sunk in for him.

 NOAH'S ARK
For Noah's Ark I wanted the kids to reenact the story themselves.  I gathered up a bunch of random costumes and made the kids into Noah and his family.  Everyone wanted to be Noah so we make them "take turns."

Our ark was a fort made out of my couch...

We all brought stuffed animals and matched them up in pairs and loaded them into our ark.  Then the kids climbed in, too.  They obviously loved this part. 

While they were in there we played the sounds of a huge storm.   Then we sent out a paper dove until it didn't come back.  Then we opened the blinds and told them to come out of the ark.  

In the window was a beautiful rainbow!

Then we made an ark craft...

The craft made a little basket and we filled them all with animal crackers...

Then I threw together another little ark snack creation which the kids happily helped eat...

THANKSGIVING

We took a break from Bible Stories to tell the story of Thanksgiving.  Hopefully, I can insert some pictures from that day at some point.  Basically we read a story about the first Thanksgiving, made a craft, and ate Turkey sandwiches.

 FEAST OF ST. NICHOLAS
We had been wanting to have a lemonade stand, but didn't know how to tie this in with the theme of God in our preschool.   We wanted to encourage the kids to give their proceeds to charity and realized this would tie in nicely with the story of St. Nicholas.  It worked out perfectly since his feast day was coming up later in the week.  The kids were very excited to help squeeze lemons and make the lemonade...

We made a little stand out by the street, but it was Tuesday and we didn't know if we would get much traffic...

We did put up a sign down by the busier road and eventually we got a few customers...

Even the Fed-Ex guy stopped and bought 2 cups...

The kids were super helpful and loved collecting the money.

They would tend to get distracted and go play and we would have to call them back, but really they all did a great job.  During the downtime we had them each color a St. Nicholas.  We read them a story about him and talked about how St. Nicholas helped the poor and gave to people in need.  They had made about $30 at our stand so we divided it up and they each got to take some with them to church to put in the poor box.

Since they were all so generous with their earnings they each got a chocolate coin as a treat...

 THE NATIVITY STORY

We moved back to the Bible for our next class, but we decided to go out of order so that we could make the lesson more seasonally appropriate.   Since it was almost Christmas, the nativity seemed the obvious choice...

We sat for story time and then we retold the story using our Little People Nativity...

Our craft was a little baby Jesus made from carboard tubes.

Our last project was to have the kids help compile bags to hand out to needy people.  Everyone brought different items like snacks and water and the kids went down the line filling the bags.  Each family took a few bags to hand out.  

It has been super fun so far and there is still more to come!