John is learning many Bible stories, but not in any particular order. We have several Catholic children's Bibles around the house, plus many books with solitary Bible stories in them (meaning, a book that is only the story of Jesus feeding the 5,000 or The Rich Man, etc.). I have often wondered how children start to grasp the arc of the timeline in the Bible when they're learning stories in a random order.This morning, with John and I eating bagels alone at 6:30 in the morning while Daddy and Mary still slept, John launched into telling me the story of Moses. To my delight, he has pieced together almost all the stories he knows about Moses and strung them in the right order! He talked me through covenant with the Jews ("when we shake hands and say that it's a deal"), Moses talking to Pharaoh and leading the Israelites out of slavery, the plagues of Egypt (when I explained the locusts eating all the crops, John said it would be okay because God would send manna from heaven to the Egyptians!), the forty years in the dessert (where God did send manna), receiving the Ten Commandments (Moses being mad, the silly golden calf, Moses being mad, the rock breaking), and coming to the Promised Land. I was overjoyed and so surprised. Now I want to remember to talk him through plugging in the other Moses stories he knows (baby in the basket in the bulrushes, the burning bush, the parting of the Red Sea, etc.).
Wow that is amazing!
ReplyDeleteSomething that is probably being repeated in my family as we speak, is the phenomenon of the oldest child learning a LOT more, earlier, than the rest of the kids. My theory has always been that the parents have repeated stories/ admonishments/ how-to's so many times that they forget they haven't told the last few kids. :) As I compare John's Bible story knowledge to Christina's I recall that Miriam knew such things at that age and Christina does not. What goes around comes around I guess! :p
Sarah: I'm sure you're absolutely right. Firstborns have nobody to talk to but mama, so they talk to an adult all day long. The more kids come along, the more duties mama has elsewhere and the more the kids talk amongst themselves. Already I realized months ago that John by 12 months knew many animal sounds ("what sound does the sheep make?" "bah!") but Mary knows only three by 16 months because I don't sit down and read board books with her.
ReplyDelete