To Live is Christ (Paul): Week One

"Remain faithful to what you have been taught!" - 2 Timothy 3:14

We started our semester-long lesson on Paul last week, and it started out awesome. The whole focus of the semester will be on being a new creation (after PSK over the summer, this seems like an awesome next step and I'm excited where God is taking us!) and there seems to be no better person to illustrate how different life with Christ is than the apostle Paul. And so, for the next 12 weeks (or so), we'll be studying a different part of Paul's life, starting with his birth, and ending with his death (and as much as we know about in between!). We're also trying to incorporate as many of the different learning styles as we can into each lesson--it's been a challenge, but the reward has been great!

Week one, we talked about the beginnings of Paul's life. I've been doing the Beth Moore study "To Live is Christ" and got a lot of my information from that. The kids LOVED this lesson! I thought for a moment that some of them might actually go subscribe to Judaism if we weren't careful!

The Lesson: When the kids walked in, we started out by telling them that this semester we'd be learning about Saul. I was shocked to find that most of them didn't know who Saul was! (One of the girls talked about King Saul, and I was impressed by that, but alas, wrong Saul!) So, we started out with Jewish traditions. The first thing we talked about was how much Saul's father wanted him to be a rabbi (as a Pharisee), and what a Jewish child went through when on that track. We started out with talking about how a five year old would need to know the torah, and have it memorized, and then worked into dressing like one of the Jews of the time. We made our own yarmulkes (yamakas) out of paper plates and markers (and talked about the meaning of the yarmulkes, which the kids maintained!), put on the tzitzits ( tassels around the shoulders ), and then put on the phylacteries (boxes of God's word over the forehead and the heart). The kids LOVED this portion and asked a lot of questions!

Activity #1: We had two sets of Jewish gear (yarmulkes, tzitzits, and phylacteries) and put together an obstacle course. The kids had to keep the jewish gear on throughout the entire obstacle course. Inside their phylacteries (Styrofoam cups), was the bible verse for the week. The team that won was the team who had every player go through the obstacle course (derobing, and rerobing) and had the entire bible verse for the week written down. The kids loved it, and boy did they learn the verse!

Activity #2: We have an ongoing timeline for the kids to work on throughout the study. The kids are separated into two groups -- writers and drawers. One group draws a picture of the lesson, and the other group writes a summary. The kids have to talk about the lesson first and pick out the most important points. They really seem to like this activity, and it's great to watch them get so excited about it. Each week we review the timeline up to that point, and it's great what they've retained.

Activity #3: Memory Verse game. Each week we spend about twenty minutes going over the memory verse. This week, we played catch. Whenever someone caught the ball, they had to say the memory verse. Then they threw it to the next person. The goal was to give everyone the ball (in an order), and shorten the time it took to go through everyone. The kids finally got it to just over a minute, and every single kid knew the bible verse when they left. It was awesome!

This week was shorter than normal too. We had a party because all of the kids had learned the bible verses over the summer and I'd promised them a party! It was fun having a party the day we learned about Jewish customs!! The kids all seemed to really love the first week! :)