I warned my kids yesterday that I was supposed to have an observer from the stake in my class today, so they were giving me a bad time this morning. As it turned out, the observer forgot our appointment, and I was off the hook.
Above you can see some caterpillars that look a lot like our Delilah. Our Delilah has a much uglier face, though.
Today’s lesson went really well. I have been making more of an effort to have a stronger beginning and conclusion to the lessons. I’ve been trying to establish the background of what we’re reading a little better each day. Today I had the kids tell me the “generations of Noah” or, the ancestors of Noah. To my surprise, they got it. I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised any more with these kids, but I just can’t get over how much they retain. They even recognized that Methuselah “took the glory to himself” and what that meant.
The lesson was in the same style as usual with Delilah. I had some verse numbers on the board, and the kids tossed Delilah (recently repaired) to each other to determine the order in which the verses were read. I wrote Sons/Daughters of God versus Sons/Daughters of Men on the board, and we wrote down characteristics of each as a compare and contrast exercise.
If you’ve read Moses 8, you know it mentions giants in verse 18. Now, I *knew* when we hit that the kids were going to be intrigued and start chatting about it. So I let them go ahead and argue about whether the giants were in fact just ordinary height and that the people were just short or whatever for a few minutes. So then I asked them if they wanted to know more about giants. One of the girls piped up that she had read the footnotes about giants during her reading. Good girl! Unfortunately she couldn’t remember anything she learned :S so we read the footnoted verses. They didn’t think they were too great, but I told them the verses helped corroborate the story — a race of giants appear many times in scripture. It’s not like it was a one time only thing or a translation error. Then I told them I happened to know there was a section in the Bible Dictionary on Giants, to their astonishment. So they looked that up and read it. Loved the information they got. In my scriptures at some point I had written about the length of the bed of one of the giants — 10 feet 6 inches — and so they loved that little detail as well.
Now I had planned for this little “detour” in our lesson. I was hoping to teach that when you read something wonky in the scriptures you can turn to the footnotes and the Bible Dictionary for more information. I even said the word wonky in class :). While I don’t think they will be able to list the characteristics of the Sons of God/men, I hope that one lesson will stick. Learning how to find out additional information about a passage when they’re studying will be an invaluable tool for them many times in life.
So, tomorrow I’ll have the observer after all. I hope that lesson goes as well. We’ll be covering the flood.
