When The Artist’s AHG troop kicked off for the year, as a Patriot she was tasked with putting together an activity for the kids that pointed them towards the Bible and that area of AHG. She came and asked me for a coloring page, and the troop shepherd saw the coloring page I gave her and fell in love with it, so she came and asked me to teach the little Tenderhearts for their Bible badge. That’s what led to me teaching a bunch of 5 and 6-year-olds the Tenderheart Bible Basics badge. One of the requirements was to read the Christmas story in two different versions and compare them. So I gathered up my non-breakable nativity sets, several Christmas story picture books and this Nativity Set Bible lesson was born.
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A couple of caveats
Our AHG troop goes with the spirit of the badge rather than the letter of the badge. The letter of the badge says you’re supposed to read the Christmas story in two different Gospels, in other words, Matthew and Luke.
But, the girls I’m working with are first-year Tenderhearts and a few Pathfinders. They do not have the attention span to listen to me read the Bible story to them, and I’d rather them understand the idea: Each Gospel tells the same story with a different emphasis than have them not focus and stubbornly read the Biblical text.
I talked it over with our troop lead and she was fine with me using storybooks instead.
This activity still works if you read the passages from the Bible, it will just work differently.
Supplies for the Nativity Set Bible lesson
Several nativity sets (Playmobil Nativity, Playmobil wisemen, Little People Nativity, Resin nativity, I’m just linking to some that look good), Several Christmas story picture books (Follow the Star [out of print], Itsy Bitsy Christmas, Donkey’s Dream, and a fourth book that I’m not remembering the name and I suspect is out of print)
This is a pretty simple Nativity Set Bible lesson
We would read each story slowly and all of the nativity sets were laid out before the kids to pick up and put on the stage (one of the stories we were reading that was a nice hardcover book).
Then as each character came in we would slowly add them onto our stage.
Sometimes a character was introduced who wasn’t in the nativity set.
I had a nativity set I found at Goodwill from Mexico (I’m assuming given style) that had Mary, Joseph, baby Jesus, and 2 javelinas. That’s it.
After we finished reading the book, and found all of the nativity characters in the story, then we would play hide the nativity set.
Which let them have a moment to move around and find them.
The girls all loved this and had so much fun. We also had a lot of fun talking about how the different nativity sets had different people in it.
All in all, the kids enjoyed the Bible lesson, and it did a good job ticking off the requirement for the girls.
This is such a cute, simple idea!