Idea Workup - OT - Joshua

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 on sound activities with kids, and also from Hands On As We Grow, which outlined a nice way to engage with kids on science topics, by having them think about a problem and write down their predictions (or hypotheses) before testing them. Which is exactly how real science is done! 

The experiment would go as follows:

• We would hand out a balloon to each child to blow up, and tie off the end. 
• We'd then draw the following grid up on the board:

• We'd ask the children to tell us what they think would happen in each of the two events (what would you hear if you tap the balloon, and if you repeat this whilst holding the balloon to your ear), and we'd record the consensus in the Predicted Outcome column. 
• We'd then ask the children to test out the two scenarios. 
• When they hold the balloon to their ear and tap it, it should sound much louder. This is because the balloon contains compressed air molecules (due to us forcing lots of air into a confined space) which act as an effective conductor for the sound wave generated by the tap. It'll be interesting to get the children to think about why this happens, before explaining the reason to them.

We can then relate this experiment back to the lesson. Heavenly Father promised Joshua that the whole of Israel would hear about him. Just like the balloon conducted our taps straight to our ears, making it loud, so will Heavenly Father take Joshua's actions straight to the ears of the people of Israel, making it loud and clear that he's coming. In this case, Heavenly Father helped Joshua's people to cross the Jordan River by parting the waters for them, and this would have sent a strong message across the land.

The next chapters talk about the taking of Jericho and Ai. In chapter 6, Jericho is taken, but then in chapter 7, the people of Ai beat back the Israelites, because one of the Israelites, Achan, oversteps in Jericho and takes something he shouldn't. (For this, Achan meets a grisly end in Joshua 7:24-26 where he and his family are stoned and burnt.) 

Here, in Joshua 7:5-10, Joshua's world is turned upside down. He thought that Heavenly Father had their back, but suddenly it looks like he doesn't any longer, and he doesn't understand why. Heavenly Father tells him to get up off his face.

There's a neat little experiment we can do to illustrate the world being turned upside down. For this, we'll need a picture and a large magnifying glass. Below is a picture of a reconstruction of the city of Ai, from the Bible Archaeology Report site.

Image from Bible Archaeology Report site.

We could either print this out and put it at one end of the room, or draw a big castle up on the board. Importantly, the image needs to be large and have good contrast. 

Now we ask one of the children to hold the magnifying glass up near the picture, and to see what they observe when they gaze through it. They should see it appear larger.

We can then ask another child, standing further back from the image, to take the magnifying glass and look at the picture. If the child is far back enough, then the image should appear blurry and also upside down. This effect is described on this page at the Progressive Glasses site.

We can explain how, when Joshua and his people were following Heavenly Father's instructions, the world was the right way up, and they were close to reaching their goal of taking the city of Jericho. But when they did something wrong, then their world turned figuratively upside down, they were beaten and their goal seemed blurry and far away, and Joshua ended up on his face 

Finally, in chapter 8, Joshua's people take the city of Ai during a carefully planned siege. Soon afterwards, Joshua and the Israelites take over the rest of the Promised Land. 

To conclude, we can have the children do a word game. They have to look at this map below showing the path taken by the Israelites through the Promised Land, and write down the first letter of each place:

Map from the iBibleMaps site.

From these letters, they have to figure out a 7 letter word which describes how Joshua felt when he failed to take the city of Ai. The word is ASHAMED, and we'll break it down into three clues:

• What three letter word describes a grey cloud of small rock that comes from a volcano? - ASH
• What two letter word is used to describe something about you? e.g. I ** hungry. - AM
• What two letter word is an abbreviation for Education? - ED

Once they guess the three sub-words, they have to put them together to find the final answer. 

That should wrap up the lesson. My next post will condense this into a formal lesson plan. If you have any comments or feedback, feel free to reply in the comments below, or on the Twitter thread.