Ruth was easy–only 4 chapters that week. We went through the story at a leisurely pace, recalling at the beginning how we were still in the time of the judges (with its requisite problems) and pointing forward at the end to the coming King Jesus who would reign forever.
The next week, we tried to eat an elephant in a single bite, packing 1 and 2 Samuel and 1 and 2 Chronicles into an hour and a half.
Race through Eli, race through Samuel. Race through Saul. Race through David. Contrast Saul with David–both sinful but one repentant. Ask whether David was the perfect king. Answer no. We need a better king. God promised one. The king that would come would be from David’s family–and would be the perfect King forever.
Each child colored a different picture. When the race through the books was done, each child showed off their picture and we talked briefly about the story behind it.
No time to do much else.
I had grand plans for our time in 1 and 2 Kings. We were going to play a “Go Fish” style game called “Good King/Bad King” that I’d thought up the night before.
We got too busy talking about the good kings and the bad kings that we didn’t have time to get to the game.
I was getting tired of trying to arrange my own lessons (drawn from my personal study) around the worksheets in the curriculum, so I’d given up on trying to impart something valuable and was now creating my lessons entirely around the worksheet.
It was, nevertheless, exhausting to feel that I wasn’t doing the Scripture justice in reducing it to stories and little factoids.
I tried to make it interesting, at least. For Ezra and Nehemiah, different children had different letters to color, royal decrees from Cyrus or Artaxerxes–and letters to the kings from the people around Jerusalem. Depending on their reading abilities, the children could read their own letter out loud or I would read it for them.
In Esther, I had planned to do the melodrama-style booing and hissing whenever Haman’s name was mentioned–but the kids were squirrelly enough already, I knew that to boo and hiss would take the class out of control. I’d lost my helper a few weeks into the year and maintaining classroom control was always a highly tenuous idea.
I acted out Job as a skit, playing God, the devil, Job, and Job’s four friends in turn, jumping from one end of the room as I switched from being the accuser to being God bragging on Job.
I recited/read chapters 1 and 2 verbatim, and distilled Job and his friends’ monologues into one or two sentences each. Once God started speaking, I expanded again, only lightly abridging the Scriptures.
Once class was over, I discovered that the teachers for the second session were sick and wouldn’t be able to come in. I did my one-woman act a second time, this time to an enormous class of kids who weren’t quite sure what to do with me (apparently, I taught a bit differently from their usual teachers–hah!)
We sang our way through Psalms. I distributed Bingo cards to each student and pulled songs from a hat, playing old Hosanna CDs borrowed from my mother and looking up the verses that went along with each song.
The next week, we did the worksheet on Proverbs and Ecclesiastes, filling in the matching questions as we read selected verses. This took too long for us to get to Song of Solomon.
I was getting thoroughly exhausted by our curriculum.
The Word of God is wonderful, but I didn’t feel like the worksheets were coming close to doing it justice. I was afraid the students were getting absolutely nothing out of the teachings. I was desperate.
I scrapped the curriculum entirely for Isaiah.