Creation story bag, continue the learning through play

I love when the lesson you teach at Sunday School follows the kids home and gives them a chance to review it and learn more about the story through the week. With older kids I like that to be them digging into the Bible, but younger kids aren’t able to do that. Instead, you can send home crafts or projects, maybe a Bible story, but I’m creating take-home bags to continue the Bible lesson when the kids go home. Today I’ve put together a Creation story take-home bag.

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Supplies for the Creation story take home bag

• small plastic animals
• small plastic swimming animals
• peg dolls (male and female)
• white, yellow, and green pom poms– white for clouds, yellow for stars, and green for plants
• Creation card game
• blue tulle
• play mat (I’ll explain how I made it)

You’ll notice I’m using similar supplies to my Creation sensory bin. Waste not, want not.

 

How to make the Creation story play mat

Ages and ages ago I wrote a post about making a fireworks t-shirt using sharpies and rubbing alcohol.

I took that idea and used it for here.

You’ll need: cotton handkerchief (it works better with cotton), Sharpies, and rubbing alcohol (okay, for those reading it in the future, I’m writing this in the midst of the Quarantine when you can’t buy any rubbing alcohol for anything less than obscene amounts of money, so I’m not linking to anything)

 

All right, so color your handkerchief with part of it green, and a slightly smaller part blue. I, of course, didn’t get a picture of this. I also discovered as I was working on this that I don’t have any rubbing alcohol other than alcohol prep pads. And I attempted to do this with hydrogen peroxide and discovered:

1. it doesn’t work the same way
2. I think it has an expiration because I’m pretty sure the containers I had were all out of shape and looked questionable

So, my big plan to blend it together better didn’t work, but I drew a not quite as cool story mat.

 

Putting together everything for the story bag

To a certain extent you can’t put together elements for every single day of Creation. Or I don’t know a way to just be like, “look this is light, and this is darkness.” So I grabbed things kind of reminiscent of the ideas.

I used some fabric scraps and stuffing to make some clouds. If you’re not a fan of sewing, you could just use white pom poms, but I had fun making those clouds.

The blue tulle added a nice bit of texture for the water area.

The giant green pom poms work well for trees and plants.

Maybe a bit of shrubbery.

Finally the yellow pom poms make a good representation of stars.

Next I dumped out my bins full of little plastic animals and picked out my favorites. Literally, they were my favorite animals in the bins.

I picked out 20 animals total, I figured twenty animals is enough to have a wide variety to play with.

Then I debated between two different possibilities for Adam and Eve. I could go with plain peg dolls which lets kids put their own idea of what Adam and Eve looked like. OR, I could paint some hair to give a bit of a start to the characters.

In the pictures, you can see I opted for the version with hair. I opted to leave off a face so they could have more fun imagining different facial expressions. Most of my peg dolls have faces painted on them, so it took me some time to find some that were only partially painted.

I forgot to put something in my Creation story bag picture

When I put it all together I grabbed most of the materials, but I forgot to include the storybook.

I grabbed all of the toys, the Creation game, story mat, and all of that, but forgot the Creation storybook.

I’d put in the Arch Book Story of Creation. I particularly like the Arch books because they aren’t too expensive to pick up lots of the books, and I can frequently find them at Half Price Books or other used bookstores.

And there you have it a nice Creation story bag to send home with kids, or let your kids at home play with.

More stories in Genesis

• Fall of Man card game
• God made you special
• Creation Unit
• Joseph follows God in jail
• Abraham, chosen by God