Scriptures Through Science

This week's lesson is based on the Book of Judges . The Come Follow Me Primary manual entry for this week says that the lesson should be derived from Judges 2–4, 6–8 and 13–16. In this post, we quickly review what these scriptures are about. We left off in the previous book , Joshua, with the Prophet Joshua having guided the Israelites into and across the Promised Land. At the end of the book, Joshua passes away. Judges picks up the story at this point and talks about how the Israelites are led by a series of leaders. Judges is a fairly bleak book, with a repeating theme of the people going astray, a (not always ideal) leader coming in to help them with guidance from Heavenly Father, bringing some short term peace and stability, before things go off the rails again. The Bible Project (YouTube) has a terrific short animated video about it. Below is a summary of the key chapters for this week: Judges 2: This chapter provides the template for the stories coming up. The people ignore

Last week's  lesson on Deuteronomy  was about Heavenly Father teaching the Israelites to care for others with an open heart, and we linked this to animal altruism, where there have been cases of animals willingly helping others (in their own or other species) without any apparent self-interest involved.  I introduced the hormone oxytocin and said that it had been shown to play a role in regulating the ability of animals to express complex caring behaviour. In experiments where scientists removed this hormone from voles, a species which is known for being monogamous and bonding for life , the affected vole partner would suddenly lose all interest in their mate. We used this idea of removing something important, and analysing the effects it would have, in our lesson, where we imagined that we had been commanded by Heavenly Father to NOT care for others, and we thought through what this would mean in our day-to-day lives. The hormone removal experiment invited several questions from c

This post follows on from the previous few posts where: I reviewed the scriptures for this week's Come Follow Me Primary lesson. ( link ) I then brainstormed various science themes that could link to the scriptures. ( link ) Yesterday I worked up one of those themes into a potential lesson plan. ( link ) In this post, I'll provide a concise lesson plan for teachers to use if they find this useful. The first part of this post (in green) is an overview of the lesson aims, and the second part (in yellow) is the actual lesson plan that you can use.  Photo by Nils Stahl on Unsplash Overview What's the lesson about? It's about the Prophet Joshua taking over from Moses as he leads the Israelites from their 40 years in the wilderness (following their exile from Egypt) into the Promised Land (Israel). Heavenly Father tells Joshua that he'll magnify him across the land, and he initially supports Joshua as his people take the city of Jericho. One of the Israelites oversteps H

In this post, I want to develop the ideas that I had in my previous post on how to teach a primary lesson on the Book of Joshua, and turn them into a lesson plan. There's a lot of interesting narrative in Joshua, making it hard to know where to start and what to focus on. I saw drawn to this set of verses though in Joshua 3 : Here, Joshua is commanding the Israelites to prepare to cross the Jordan River. In verse 7 (highlighted in orange), Heavenly Father rewards his efforts by saying "This day will I begin to magnify thee in sight of all Israel", indicating that he will make Joshua appear mighty across the Promised Lands that the Israelites are attempting to cross into and conquer.  The idea of magnification here implies making Joshua appear larger than he is, or perhaps making his actions reverberate more loudly across the region (or both). We can attempt to illustrate this through a simple experiment. I got the idea from this from the Team Cartwright site's page

Going forwards, I'm going to break up my posts on lesson development into several pieces, to make them more manageable to read (and write): I'll start off with a summarisation of the key chapters that are the subject of that week's Come Follow Me Primary manual. I'll then do a brainstorming post where I jot down various inspirations that come to mind as I read through those chapters. Most of these ideas will end up in the rubbish bin, but they might be useful inspiration to others.  There'll be a post on working up the ideas into a lesson plan. At the end of this, I'll answer the following questions to ensure that the plan ticks the right boxes: What is the spiritual theme of the lesson? What is the science (or other) topic that I want to use to help convey the theme? How does the science illustrate the theme? What will make the lesson fun? The lesson plan itself will now be a separate post, which will make it easier for other teachers to refer to.  It'll co

This week's lesson is on the Book of Joshua, and in my previous post, I outlined the content in the key scriptures that are selected for this lesson by the Come Follow Me Primary manual . In this post, I'll summarise the ideas I've had about linking the scriptural content to science ideas. In Joshua 1 it says "Every place that the sole of your foot shall tread upon, that have I given unto you, as I said unto Moses." This evoked an image of the moon landing and the iconic photo of the astronaut's footprint on the moon's surface . Maybe there's some way to link the two, since they're both bold steps into a new world, which took great acts of human endurance to reach. Photo by George Evans on Unsplash In Joshua 3  it says "And the Lord said unto Joshua, This day will I begin to magnify thee in the sight of all Israel, that they may know that, as I was with Moses, so I will be with thee." This could link to a topic on optical magnification

This week's lesson is on the Book of Joshua, and according to the  Come Follow Me Primary manual , will be based on Joshua 1-8 and 23-24. The first task is to understand what's in these scriptures, and this scripture review post aims to do that. These videos do a nice job of explaining the narrative: These Saddleback Kids videos are aimed at young children. They treat the story of Joshua in several pieces: Joshua Leads (Joshua 1) - YouTube Rahab and the Spies (Joshua 2) - YouTube The Israelites Cross the Jordan (Joshua 3-4) - YouTube The Walls of Jericho (Joshua 5) - YouTube The Bible Project does a great job of summarising whole books in the Bible through clever comic strip style animations. YouTube The Book of Joshua seems to break down into the following parts: The first part picks up from Exodus and Deuteronomy, where Moses has brought the Israelites to the cusp of the promised land before passing away. The mantle thus falls upon Joshua, who sends spies into the Promised La

One of the most useful tools I've found for helping to prep primary lessons is the scripture annotation tool on churchofjesuschrist.org . This underrated feature is fantastic! Here's what it looks like: When you select a piece of text, you see this annotation menu appear, from which you can highlight the scriptures in different colours (I have my own fledgling colour coding system), tag it, write notes, and share it or link directly to it. More impressively is that if you have the Gospel Library mobile app , then these annotations will sync directly to it, so you can carry your fully annotated version with you. This has been handy for when I want to use my laptop for doing lesson prep, but then just take my phone or iPad with me to the lesson, and I can still call up my notes when needed. Do others use this too, and does anyone have any "power tips"? What other tools do you find useful in your lesson prep? Feel free to let me know in the comments below or on my Twitte

Last week I posted about some initial ideas I had for how to teach my upcoming lesson on the Book of Deuteronomy. I've settled on the theme of animal altriusm  (when animals help out others), and now I need to turn this into a lesson plan.  If you'd like to jump straight to the final lesson plan, click here . If you'd like to see how I got to it, read on... Photo by Cosmic Timetraveler on Unsplash The link here is Deuteronomy 15:10 , when Moses is preaching to the Israelites, and he relates Heavenly Father's instructions that the people are to help others with an open heart.  In my previous post , I thought that I could draw a parallel between this message from HF and animal altruism. I was curious about what was known about animal altriusm. It seems that there are several types: Animals may be programmed to help others, even when it means they are at a biological disadvantage when it comes to their own reproductive potential. This is described as biological altruism

The next LDS Come Follow Me primary lesson covers the whole of the Book of Deuteronomy, which relates the story of the Israelites wandering through the wilderness for 40 years in search of the Promised Land, as led by Moses, and which is mostly told in sermon form by Moses. It ends with Moses finally being able to see the Promised Land shortly before he passes away. Moses gazes upon the Promised Land from atop Mount Nebo. From Wikipedia . Rather than try to teach the story of the whole book though, I think it'll be nicer to focus on one specific lesson that we can take from a small part of it. My preferred brainstorming approach is to think of some ideas about how we can use science to connect to the themes from the scriptures, and then work up the best ideas into lesson plans. Here are some of the ideas that came to mind as I read through Deuteronomy: Deuteronomy 6 talks about "frontlets", which are intended to mean ornaments worn on the head. However they can also mea

Today's lesson, based on the ideas in my planning post , went well. The final lesson plan was: Introduce the theme of how doing things slightly differently to how we're told can have big consequences. Write up on the board the following quotes: From Exodus 17:5, "thou shalt smite the rock, and there shall come water out of it". From Numbers 20:8: "speak ye unto the rock before their eyes; and it shall give forth his water", then from  Numbers 20:11, "And Moses lifted up his hand, and with his rod he smote the rock twice: and the water came out abundantly". Discuss how Moses carried out the instructions in Exodus 17 perfectly, and was rewarded, but in Numbers 20, he deviated from HF's instructions (by hitting the rock instead of talking to it), and was punished as a result. Do the science experiment. Take two cups of cold water, and two cups of warm water, and a sheet of thin plastic that covers the top of one cup. All the cups should be the sam

My next LDS primary lesson, on Sunday 15th May, will be on a section of the Book of Numbers from the Old Testament. The LDS Primary Come Follow Me lesson plan recommends focusing on Numbers 12 (where Moses' siblings expressed discontent at what Moses was doing), Numbers 21 (the story of the brass serpent) and Numbers 22 (the story of Ballam, the priest who was asked to curse Moses, but who refused to do so). I've been thinking about a different take on this lesson, which focuses on a story from Numbers 20 . It's going to involve some messy water play... Photo by Lubomirkin on Unsplash It tells the story of Moses carrying out a command from Heavenly Father: Crucially, whilst Moses was instructed to talk to the rock, he instead hit it, thus disobeying HF. The way this event unfolds is in contrast to an earlier, similar episode in Exodus 17 , where Moses is instructed to hit a rock, does so, and water emerges. The question is why did a seemingly small difference in Moses'

This year we're studying the Old Testament, and today's lesson was on Exodus 24, the story of Moses and the Israelites gathered on Mount Sinai, shortly after Moses has received the Ten Commandments. The Come Follow Me lesson plan is here  in case you're interested, although I ended up doing something a little different here. The theme for my lesson was blood filtration, and the kids had a blast with the central science experiment.  Red blood cells. Photo by ANIRUDH on Unsplash . The idea for this lesson came from a section early on in Exodus 24: The text describes something called a "blood covenant", where animal sacrifices were given to Heavenly Father. Following the ceremony, blood from the animal would be scattered upon the altar and the worshippers in order to spiritually cleanse their sins. Fortunately today our services involve the sacrament as a means of spiritual renewal, by partaking of the blood and flesh of Christ through drinking water and eating brea

Earlier today I bore my testimony with A3 (because I like to drag at least one of the kids up on stage whenever I do so). A3 spoke about how we'd recently been burgled, and how someone had come into our home and stolen our keys and our car.  I then related a recent story about how Mick Schumacher, a German Formula 1 driver, was involved in a huge crash a few weeks ago whilst qualifying for a race in Saudi Arabia ( YouTube ). His initial impact with the wall was at 270 kph (160 mph), and the car ended up a considerable way down the track. Amazingly, he was uninjured.  A key reason for this is that contemporary F1 cars are built with multiple robust safety features, including deformable crumple zones and break points. These are designed to absorb the majority of the kinetic energy from an impact and to deflect it away from the shell containing the driver.  I spoke about how faith in Heavenly Father was like a spiritual crumple zone which was able to absorb and soften the impact of th