This was one of my favorite activities so far.
Day 1
I took my hair and tied a rubber band around it under my chin so it looked like a beard and read the story of Israel from The Millennial Instructor: The True Olive Tree.
If you have a fake beard and read in an old man voice you are most certainly more likely to have a captive audience. Plus the story is told from the perspective of Abraham.The first day I told them the stories of Adam down to Abraham. My kids have heard most of these stories many times. We have a lot of story book bibles. Here are some of our favorites.
There are also probably many movies that represent these stories. I wanted to spend a good amount of time on the story of Israel. I believe it’s key to their future investment in the story. As I told the story we crouched on the ground with our butcher paper and colored pencils and drew this timeline.
I used a couple family tree/genealogical charts I found on Pinterest to make sure I got the names and order right. I focused on Priesthood and Birthright. Next to each Patriarch (which have a yellow cloud around their name) I drew a treasure chest with the letters “BR” inside to represent the birthright and “PH” in green to represent the priesthood. The kids helped color the whole thing, as you can see. We had a lot of fun.
Day 2
We finished the chart from Abraham to the 12 sons of Jacob. We watched the Living Scriptures Old Testament cartoon about Abraham and Isaac. I always cry when I read or watch that story. That would be so hard. The parallel between Abraham and Isaac and the Father and Son is powerful. I made sure to touch on that with them when the movie was over.
We also briefly discussed the Abrahamic Covenant which I also reviewed by looking at an image on Pinterest. If you look on our chart, we drew a representation of the covenants to the right of Abraham and Sariah.
Abrahamic Covenant:
Posterity
Land
Priesthood
Salvation and Exaltation
My favorite story to tell was about Isaac and Esau. The kids weren’t as familiar with that one. Trading the Birthright for soup? Also, did you know they were twins? Not sure how I missed that. Anyway, we finally got to the 12 sons of Jacob and called it a day. There are so many faith promoting stories here. Drawing them as we talked and using character voices made it come alive.