Today's Adventure Box lesson was about the census. I'll be honest, a census is a really hard thing for children to understand....but if you add candy into the lesson it seems to make it a bit more interesting! Ha!
So our Bible verse for today was Luke 2:1-4...
"In those days Caesar Augustus issued a decree that a census should be taken of the entire Roman world. This was the first census that took place while Quirinius was governor of Syria. And everyone went to their own town to register. So Joseph also went up from the town of Nazareth in Galilee to Judea, to Bethlehem the town of David, because he belonged to the house of David."
I'll be honest, by the time I got done reading that passage my 4 year old was grabbing his feet and rolling back on his back staring at the ceiling. He was most definitely not interested.
Until I told them to open their gift......a BIG bag of Skittles.
Funny how those little colorful candies just reeled his attention right back in!
I began by explaining to them what a census is...a way to count people. Then I dumped all of the Skittles into the middle of a table. I said, "Let's pretend that all of these people are from (insert your hometown here)". On a side note, when I dumped those things out their little eyes got even wider - if that's possible. I then had them go round up a bunch of their stuffed animals. We put a stuffed animal at different corners of the table. I explained that each stuffed animal represented a different town and that each color Skittle represented the people that were from that town (for understanding sake we kept the names of the towns ones that they would recognize). So, for example, even though there are green skittle people living in our hometown - they may have been born in Chicago!
Then I had them separate all of the people from "our town" into the town they were born in. I explained that this is exactly what happened to the parents of Jesus. They had to travel to Bethlehem so that Joseph could fulfill the census....and while they were there Jesus was born! We also discussed HOW they traveled because they surely couldn't just hop on an airplane!!!! Ha!
In all this was a tough lesson, but I think with each passing year they will both grow to understand how the census was instrumental in why we celebrate Christ's birth in BETHLEHEM.
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