Noah's Ark

This week we are learning about Noah's Ark in our bible story time, so it has been infiltrating our classroom.  The water in the water table is blue with all kinds of animals hiding in there.

We have a pretty fantastic Fisher Price Noah's Ark set with a TON of Fisher Price animals, so the toy table was a lot of fun to re-enact the story and pretend.  I even had a couple kids arrange all the animals in pairs, Two by Two.

Our Noah's Ark craft combined scissor skill practice with actually making it rain onto our arks.  I had a simple drawing of an ark photocopied onto brown card stock.  The kids first colored the ark with crayons, cut it out and then glued it onto the paper.  Some then drew pictures with crayons on the white paper, but most wanted to skip right to the rain!

I filled a spray bottle with water and blue food coloring.  You have to make sure the food coloring is pretty concentrated so that it looks very blue on paper.  The kids placed their drawing into a bucket, stood back and then squirted the water bottle to make it "rain" onto their Noah's ark.  The water repels from the crayon and makes a really cool water resist effect with tiny blue droplets all over the page.  Unless of course the kids got trigger happy, and actually "flooded" their page ;)

We also talked about the rainbow being a promise from God to never flood the earth again.  We can stand on God's promises and keep them in our hearts.

Creation

"In the beginning, God created the Heavens and the Earth.  Genesis 1:1"

We are so lucky to have Pastor Nathan come up and tell us the bible story once a week.  We sure do love his huge flannel story board!  Each week Pastor Nathan and I tell a new bible story and of course we started the year off with Creation.  

We made really cool splatter paintings by using a small plastic contraption called a "bellow", squishing it so it could suck up some yellow paint and then squeezing it some more so it squirted the paint all over our black card stock.  This was to symbolize how God created the heavens and the earth.  

Our paintings looked so beautiful displayed on the wall all together!

All month long the kids have been practicing their memory verse as well:

"In the beginning, God created the Heavens and the Earth.  Genesis 1:1"

You should ask your child to demonstrate for you how well they know this verse!

A fun song we learned about creation was Hip Hip Hip Hippopotmaus.  The kids crack me up when they do their great big hippo dances!  Here's the lyrics and a video to show you the tune:

"In the beginning God made the seas
And the forest filled with trees
He built the mountains up so high
And at the top he placed the sky.

God's fingerprints are everywhere
Just to show how much he cares
And in the middle he had so much fun
He built the hippo who weighed a TON!

Hip hip hip Hippopotamus
Hip hip hooray God made all of us!

Hip hip hip Hippopotamus

Hip hip hooray God made all of us!"