Allegory of the Olive Tree

Okay. I always skipped (or at best skimmed) Jacob 5 when I read it in the past. I just didn’t want to take the time to read into it all. Well, my friends...not this time.

Thanks to these lovely podcasts (Screenshot below-there are 3 parts) I really dug in this time and tried to understand. And it wasn’t as difficult as I thought. I just knew that if I wanted to teach my children this story and some of its meaning I had better get that straight myself.

My major takeaways are:

1. God is constantly trying to reach out to us and giving us more and more chances. He is so patient with us. 2. The history matching up with the allegory was a remarkable revelation. Thank you Zenos. 3. Are there people still trying to say Joseph made this up?? 🤦🏼‍♀️😧I have read the arguments against The Book of Mormon and this has got to be a huge stumbling block for any sincere seeker. It is more than highly unlikely that Joseph could have known or had access to Olive Tree horticulture considering there were no olive trees (to our knowledge on the continent at the time). What a random hobby Joseph. 😆

Okay that last one went a little long. But you get the idea.

So our activities...

First of all these 2 movies are awesome to give a basic summary of the story. The second one is a corny one that teaches more about the process of caring for the vineyard with the allegory tied in...and costumes. 😆🤗

There is a lesson plan that goes with the first video. We just used the craft part. 😁

You can see from the middle photo that we drew a representation of the poor, poorest and good spot of ground in the vineyard where the natural branches were planted. We also cut out a picture of a fire to represent the judgement. Last, I printed an extra set of branches for the group so we could color wild branches. We watched the video and paused it to move the branches around as the story progressed. The bottom photo was our final product. We glued the branches onto the natural tree in the picture. We put them in plastic sheet protectors and added them to our binders.

Then, once we had the story down we went to the Duet Podcast free workbook to draw the symbols of each part of the allegory.