Into Their Hearts: Art, Science, and Lessons for the Heart through Noah

Interestingly, before even beginning learning activities revolving around Noah’s Ark, JayBird wanted to make an ark craft. Originally he wanted to make it out of popsicle sticks, but it worked out better to cut strips of paper. This also gave him practice cutting on straight lines.

We then talked about a variety of things that God wants him to be obedient in. As you can see, it is written on the ark, each in a different color of the rainbow. This was such a fun spur of the moment activity!

And then, onto some drawing to fulfill his passion for art! This is a giraffe for the ark.

In learning that Noah was obedient and had to follow careful instructions to build the ark, we practiced our listening and problem solving skills with a scavenger hunt. Special little treasures were hidden around our backyard. JayBird (and JellyBean) were given simple clues to find these treasures.

Clues eventually led to the best treasure of all…

JESUS!!

We used our children’s Bible to count by 2’s by counting the animals entering the ark, but JayBird being the active boy and kinesthetic learner that he is jumped up, grabbed some counting bears, and made his own game of counting by two’s. He put the red and yellow bears in pairs of two. The blue bears are laying their side was to represent a dash in between each pair. For him, this made sense and helped distinguish each pair. He then practiced counting by 2’s up to 12…and almost 14 but not quite. He problem solved and did the math on his own to go from ten to twelve and when he figured it out, we hugged and were so giddy together that he figured it out on his own! He didn’t want any help at all or even for me to look while he was figuring out what came after ten while counting by two’s. :-)

(Oh, and those black crescent shaped moons on his shirt…well he was pretending to be a cow with moon shaped spots earlier in the day. LOL)

Here JellyBean works on a brand new Noah’s Ark puzzle. I think her favorite part was making the birds fly in the air. :-)

When learning about the flood, our science experiment was seeing if items would sink or float. JayBird would make a hypothesis for each item and then place the items on a chart.

And of course we had to see if Noah’s Ark would float…

We also acted out the scene of Noah and his family coming off the ark and praising God for keeping them safe. Then we made banana rainbows! JayBird sliced up bananas that we arranged into the shape of a rainbow.

Both JayBird and JellyBean then sprinkled colored/flavored gelatin onto the banana slices to resemble a rainbow. I realized later that this probably could also have been done with kool-aid powder, and at a fraction of the cost!

They thoroughly enjoyed their creations! Mmmm! Such a good way to have fun with healthy food! My kiddos go through phases of loving bananas and not wanting them so much. So this is a wonderful activity to encourage them to eat bananas when they are in their no banana stage! We’ve already done it a second time!