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Brainstorming - OT - 1 Samuel

In my last post, I reviewed the scriptures for this week's Primary lesson from 1 Samuel. In this post, I've jotted down some ideas that came to mind about how I could approach teaching this lesson. 

  • In 1 Samuel 9, Saul covered a lot of ground looking for the asses, crossing over half of the Promised Land! This post on iStudyEBS has a map showing the approximate area being covered, along with an interesting justification for the size of the search area. Their idea is that Saul had to cover a large area in order to be in the right place at the right time when Samuel was looking for a potential king for the Israelites. There could be an interesting geography lesson about the areas covered.

  • The BibleProject summary video of 1 Samuel makes a really interesting observation that the book charts a trajectory for Saul and David, which starts off with their humble beginnings, then rises to a peak where they have Heavenly Father's favour and everything's going right, but then they make misteps and descend. Maybe we could do something physics based where we make a paper or card based rollercoaster to mimic this trajectory. We could tie it into a discussion of energy conservation, and potential energy being converted to kinetic and heat energy. 

  • When you have the story of David v Goliath, maybe it's best to keep it simple, tell the story as-is, and let the kids do something which uses their imagination (e.g. draw a picture or poster of the scene). (Or the same rollercoaster idea could be used to illustrate the energy that a small stone or marble can have.)

  • In 1 Samuel 18, tabrets are played for David. We could have a look at what this instrument is.
As always, I welcome any feedback, either in the comments below, or on the Twitter thread.


David vs Goliath. Photo by Astrid Schaffner on Unsplash

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