FHE: Jesus Gives Us New Life

Well, for FHE this week I really wanted to try and do something to explain to Lincoln why we celebrate Easter; however, explaining the resurrection to a two year old seemed like a daunting task. What did I do? I delegated :) (that Jethro, what a genius!) and told Aaron if he would teach the lesson on Easter and try to tie in why we use baby lambs and chicks, and eggs and all that as symbols of Easter, that I would do an activity to go with.

Aaron did a fantastic job. He has a lot easier time relating things to Lincoln in a simple way, or at least in a way that Lincoln pays attention to. Probably their engineering minds think alike, who knows. Anyways, he started out by having Linc sit underneath our laundry basket. He explained that if we didn't have Jesus we would be trapped, kind of like Lincoln was trapped under the laundry basket, we wouldn't be able to get out. But since Jesus is our big brother and loves us, he helped to make us free. At that point Aaron took the laundry basket off of Lincoln. Next Aaron had made two paper flowers. He took one of them and he and Lincoln played with it until it ripped into a couple pieces. Then Aaron asked Lincoln to fix the flower. Linc tried for awhile, and then came to the conclusion that he couldn't fix it. Aaron explained that sometimes things get broken that only Jesus can fix, but because we have Jesus we can be whole again. Then Aaron pulled out the second flower that was still in one piece.

Then Aaron explained that because of Jesus's ressurection, He is able to make us free and whole and to give us a new life. The resurrection happened in the spring time. Also in the spring time is when baby animals are born. They start a new life. When we celebrate the resurrection it is called Easter. We use baby chicks, lambs, eggs, and other things because they remind us of new life, which is what Jesus did for us.

I'm not really sure how much of that Lincoln will actually retain, but he liked the lesson and we didn't have to remind him one time to sit still or pay attention. So that's a plus. I really thought Aaron did such a good job with the lesson.

For our activity, we made chicks out of construction paper. We traced each of our hands, and used those for wings. We let the kids (sort of, it was very chaotic and close to bedtime, I'm actually surprised the chicks turned out at all) pick where to glue the pieces on, and then we hung them up in the window by our eggs.

As you can see, this art project was most definitely made for children sized hands. Mine and Aaron's chicks look like they were taking wing steroids. But it's all good. :)