B is for Bible

Our second (and third, and, if I'm being completely honest, part of the fourth) week of homeschool we learned that B is for Bible. First we gathered all of their Bibles. Do you think we have enough?

And the other books about the stories we focused on.

Sidenote: There is a woman at our church who doesn't like to call them "Bible stories" because she doesn't want kids to think of them as fictional stories. She calls them "Bible truths," which seems a little redundant. I explained to the boys that history is what we learn about things that happened a long time ago, and the Bible is God's word and it teaches us about the first things that happened when God created the world. Then I continued to call them Bible stories. Thoughts?

I found the Creation book on the Junk Jaunt last summer. It is almost word for word from the Bible. We love it. We read it on Monday, along with each version of Creation from the various Bibles.

They memorized "In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. Genesis 1:1" They had some trouble spitting out Genesis (Jonathan, Gennison) but they figured it out and earned a mini-marshmallow every time they said it. They've eaten a lot of mini-marshmallows these past few weeks.

For the craft, I cut out the sun, moon, and stars for them to glue. They also had some cotton balls to stretch out for clouds but Evan just glued them as they were and Ethan cut his with scissors before gluing. Whatever.

Another day (week, whatever) we read about Noah's Ark, sang about Noah's Ark, and played with their Little People Noah's Ark.

I love books illustrated by Peter Spier. They are amazing. But his Noah's Ark is a little depressing.

Beautiful, right? Not to the poor animals not chosen for the 2-by-2 line.And there are the poor animals getting wetter and wetter and..

Wahh. It seems to keep it a little too real for preschoolers but the boys didn't notice this time. Whew, death talk averted.

We tried to draw rainbows and make thumbprint animals but none of it really looked like anything. Oh well! No grades here!

For the Christmas lesson, I went down to the basement to find some things I had packed away recently. (Very recently. Embarrassingly recently.) We had a great craft, thanks to Laura and Emily providing us with mangers and Baby Jesus figures, and thanks to my slackerness (slackerocity?) for not getting the craft done at Christmastime.

The official way is to glue straw in the mangers but I thought we could stretch it out a little longer and incorporate their favorite thing to do these days by cutting paper for straw. It worked. Ethan carefully cut his into long stips, then small square pieces.

Evan didn't.

In the midst of playing, laughing, eating, and jumping around, we managed to talk about shapes, long/short, wide/narrow, count ing by 2's, animals, history; and practice fine motor skills and memorization. So far, so good.