Old Testament/Creation Lesson Block

 It's so exciting to see one lesson block after another already passing!  We start our Old Testament/Jewish Studies block two weeks ago.  We technically still have another week where we'll be learning about the garden of Eden and the Cain & Abel stories.  But these two weeks, focused on the creation, kind of deserve their own blog post. 

For story time, we read a chapter each day from this book:

It's a collection of Jewish folk tales woven together by the memories of a young girl living with her Jewish grandmother.   So not only did we enjoy the stories themselves, but we also got a glimpse into Jewish life and a taste of some of the festivals and customs.  Dallin really enjoyed hearing these stories and often asked for more than one each day.

The bulk of what we did during this block was to paint the seven days of creation, to read each day from the scriptures the verses corresponding to that day, and then for Dallin to copy portions of the text to go along with the paintings to make a special "Creation book".   This is the cover he made for his book:

I've included samples from some of the pages.   The painting ideas came either from Donna Simmons' Old Testament Manual or from this Waldorf manual from South Africa.

First day of creation (dividing light from darkness):

Second day of creation (dividing the waters from the waters to make a firmament, or sky):

I love that painting!  I think he did beautiful work!

Third day of creation (forming dry land and vegetation):

Fourth day of creation (sun, moon, and stars):

Now, his decoration of his page cracks me up.  And I suppose I should have supervised it better.  Notice how he drew trees representing each season?  And he drew actual signs?  I asked him about the signs, and he said, "Well, it said that God made [the sun, moon, and stars] for signs and seasons!"  He took the word "signs" literally, so he literally drew signs.  I about busted a gut!

Fifth day of creation (fish and fowl):

He swore to me that the fish on the left are actual fish that have been created sometime, somewhere.  OK.  And I think he forgot which page he was working on with he put an animal in, but he tried to justify it by telling me that the animal came out of the water.  LOL!

Seventh day of creation:

This is a candlestick with seven candles to represent the seven days. 

I also thought his decoration for the text of the seventh day was pretty creative.  He drew God resting in bed, and the blanket is decorated with all the creations from the previous six days.

It took quite a bit of focus and determination to finish this project.  Even for me!  Setting up watercolor painting every single day for seven school days takes a lot of commitment!  Dallin was pretty tired of painting by the end, but he hung in there and did mostly good work.  He also did not particularly enjoy the copy work, but it too was a good will-building activity for him.  We used that as handwriting practice as well.  Each day I chose portions of the text for the day for him to do in cursive and had him practice those portions ahead of time.

Each day prior to reading the verses and painting, we discussed the phenomena that were created on that day.  I got this idea from the Live Ed sample curriculum pages for the Old Testament.  So on the first day, we discussed the differences between light and dark.  We talked about what gifts we get from light, such as heat and color.  The second day we discussed the differences between water and air.  The fourth day we talked about the sun, moon, and stars, and such things as telling time, figuring out the months by the moon phases, and how people travelled using the stars to find their direction.  We had some good discussions!

We've spent time discussing what Judaism is.  We've talked about Shabbat, the Jewish sabbath.   We learned the first few lines of the book of Genesis in Hebrew.  (Well, sort of...  we tried!)  We also learned a Jewish song, Oseh Shalom.  (The version in the link is pretty "pop" ish, but the singing is very clear, so it's a good one to get an idea of the words.)  Dallin and Sariah both loved singing this every day, much to my surprise!  We also learned a poem called Song of Creation from the above-mentioned Waldorf training manual from South Africa.

For spelling we used Marsha Johnson's idea of working through the 500 most common words in the English language.  Dallin is almost through the first 200.  He loves this "spelldown" type of activity.  I put all the words into five jars, 100 words per jar.  Each day we pull words out and he keeps spelling until he misses one (he does get 2-3 chances to get it right).  Once he misses a word, we're done for the day, and he has to write that word five times, then it goes back into the jar for another time.

For grammar we've been reviewing punctuation and capitalization.  I took the punctuation verses from An English Manual by Dorothy Harrer (from the fourth grade chapter), and we acted them out.  This is ia picture of Dallin acting out the exclamation point verse (the verse is written on the blackboard).  He loved this!

Then I've been giving him editting-type work to do.  Several days I wrote down some sentences incorrectly and he had to go through and put in the proper punctuation and capitalization.  One day he got most of it wrong, and I could tell he was being very sloppy because he KNOWS this stuff and has since public school first grade.  So I told him that this must mean he needs more practice, and therefore we will keep doing these activities until he can show me that he understand the concepts.  Hopefully this will entice him to be more careful!