Tuesday Slice of Life : January 24, 2017.

The biblical story of Noah’s ark is an all time preschool favorite. Kids like the animals. They like the big boat. And they really like the rainbow. It is also a favorite of mine because it is the story of a just man of faith who walked with God. (Genesis 5:9, Hebrews 11:7)

In our Sunday School class we created an ark and animal puppets so the kids could retell the Bible story through play.

To make Noah’s ark, we used two chinet paper plates. I cut one plate in half and the kids colored it’s bottom side to look like a wooden ship. Around the edge they colored blue for water. Then we stapled the half plate to a full plate so as to form a pocket which served as the ship.

I had found some cute animal clip art online and printed several sets. Before class I cut them out and glued them to wooden coffee stir sticks* from Starbucks. In class, as soon as the kids had their boats ready, they picked out their animals, two of each — the animals went into the ark two-by-two.

The kids made rainbows using the half of the chinet plate that we cut off when we created their ark. They boldly colored the first rainbow stripe red starting on the outer edge of the plate which is the top of arch. We continued with orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, violet. As happens with preschoolers, not all rainbows had all the colors in that order. And some may have missed a color or two. We trimmed the inside of the rainbow in an arch along the edge of the last colored stripe, then taped on a coffee stir stick so kids could hold their rainbows above their ark when they took their animals out.

The kids loved their little animal puppets and had lots of fun making them walk two-by-two up to their ark, putting them into the ark, and then taking them out of the ark as we retold Noah’s story over and over.

*No, I didn’t take a handful of coffee stir sticks on my last visit to Starbucks. When I purchase coffee for a group from Starbucks, it comes in a “coffee traveler” along with a generous number of stir sticks, sweeteners, cream, and cups. Well, I don’t throw unused stuff away, so the stir sticks always end up in my craft bins. And finally I found a use for them — 😊 !

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