As I mentioned at the beginning of the year, Crayons (Grade 4) is using the Grade 5 Bible Geography and Archaeology curriculum printed out from this site.
I won't say it's been the most enthralling course ever, in spite of the fact that the silly multiple-choice questions try to lighten things up. In light doses, it's all right...and I still think the content or at least the concept is very important. In some places, there isn't enough content given in the week's lesson outline--you are expected to be using outside resources, I think, to really teach about Ur or Nineveh or Sodom and Gomorrah. (That is, besides reading the suggested Bible texts.) And that's okay; you might have a favourite film or book, or have access to Bible history magazines or something of that sort to show what life was like then and where those places were, or what's been dug up there recently. In that case, the printed questions are really just for review at the end of the lesson.
What I really like, though, is the part of the course we're in now. We've just finished looking at several of the kingdoms that surrounded Israel, or Palestine, or whatever you want to call it, in Old Testament times. In Sunday School you hear briefly about Ammon, Moab and so on--but unless you're a real keener and go look them up on a map in the back of your Bible, you probably don't have much idea about those places. So we've tried to fix the "near neighbours" in our heads; and then the course goes on to cover the Big Guys. Assyria, Babylon/Chaldea, Persia. This is where things could get awfully dull or mixed up if the Sunday School teacher knew more about Israel than he/she did about general world history. But, on a personal note, I do not remember, ever, any childhood Sunday School lessons that explained who all those guys were or how they were connected, how what they were doing in the Bible stories connected with Big World History. So I guess that even a dull little would be better than a big blank. I got to grade 11 World History and, in spite of thinking then that I knew my Bible stories (and I did, probably better than a lot of people in the class), I didn't have a clue about Mesopotamia or any other empires, or what went on between the Old and New Testaments. The connections just weren't there.
So I'm trying to ensure that Crayons gets something to remember out of these particular lessons...just a few pegs at least to hang future history and Bible study on. When I read the early chapters of Hillyer's History with Ponytails a few years ago, we talked about the A-B-C's of Ancient History/Mesopotamia: Assyria, Babylon, Chaldea; that's easy to remember. We're looking at pages from the very visual Usborne Book of World History (this is what ours looks like), which is good because it shows Assyria sandwiched in between the early Babylonians/Mesopotamians and the later ones. There's a good Assyria/Babylon page in People of the Bible: Life and Customs. Just be careful if you're looking up this sort of information for younger students, because the Assyrians, in particular, were known for their cruelty (and because, if you're familiar with Usborne history books or read the Amazon reviews, there can also be nudity and other problems with what's included, what's left out and so on).
All this can lead to very interesting side discussions about goddesses, and Hanging Gardens, and clay tablets. But the key to it--for me--is not so much even the physical map of where those empires were. It's the mental map that, I hope, will fire off a ka-ching in the future when some of this comes up again.
The most ironic thing about this, I suppose, is that I saw a letter to the editor in this week's paper, saying that fifth-grade children are too young to read the Bible. This was in response to a local debate about whether a Bible-distribution society (you know the one, it's in a Beatles song) should be allowed to continue to offer free New Testaments to fifth graders here as they have for many years. The teacher sends the info slips home once a year, interested parents send them back, and the teacher distributes the requested books after class. But that's not enough separation-of-church-and-state for some people, so it's caused a lot of argument recently. Anyway, I wondered if and when the writer thought that children should be old enough to read or hear the Bible! For me, grade 11 was almost too late to start fitting the pieces together. I'm hoping a little more will stick for Crayons.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
0 comments:
Post a Comment