Children's Church: Catastrophe - the Flood

If you teach Sunday school or children's church, these Sunday posts are for you. I get so distracted when I look for ideas! So, I thought compiling ideas by topic might be helpful for others--plus it helps me clean up one of my Pinterest boards! Check out other ideas here.

I've been following the Answers Bible Curriculum. It goes through the Bible in chronological order with a strong apologetics component. It has great info, but I've started to supplement with more hands-on activities. Several months ago, I taught several lessons on the flood. I think it's one of the biggest scientific answers to the millions of years interpretation a lot of people come up with when they look at layers of the earth, the fossil record, canyons, continental drift, etc. I wanted to make sure my Sunday school kiddos really saw the flood as a historical event, not just a cute little story. Here are a few of the activities we did over several weeks. 

- Edible ark - the kids built an ark out of graham crackers and filled it with animal crackers. I wish I would've had frosting or peanut butter to aid in construction.  (inspired by a similar snack found at the Easy Preschool Craft blog) 

- Sorting plastic animals into "kinds" - The boys have two massive tubs of animals. I dumped them all out and had groups sort them into similar species. Then we read Genesis 6:20 discussed that Noah wouldn't have had to take as many animals as some people may think. For example, he wouldn't have had to take two horses, zebras, and mules, just two from that kind. The variety in their DNA allowed for many different species to result as the repopulated after the flood. I made sure to include dinosaurs too, to emphasize that Noah would have taken dinosaur kinds. 

- Comparing plastic animals of different sizes; particularly dinosaurs. We discussed that Noah might have taken the babies, because they'd be smaller, live longer, sleep more, and eat less. I shared with them that even the largest dinosaur eggs we've discovered are only about one foot long, so even big dinos started out small.
- Pouring water into a "world" in a pan high enough to cover tall rocks and showing that shorter rocks are covered. This helps kids see why, if the Bible is true, Noah's flood had to be global because it says the highest mountains were covered. 
- Reading the ark dimensions from the Bible. (11 1/2 school buses long and four school buses high) and then analyzing depictions of the ark as realistic or not (I made a slide show of cartoon-y and realistic pictures and had the kids label them as reasonable or ridiculous)
- Fingerprint rainbows  (sorry - can't credit this source - it was a just a pinned photo)

- Discussed how rapid burial is necessary for fossils to form and that the flood would have quickly buried billions of creatures. 
- Fossil cookies (inspired by these from Martha Stewart)

- Fossil necklaces (similar to these from Vintage Paper Moon, though ours didn't turn out nearly as cute) - I used bake-dry clay. The kids cut it into circles or rectangles (with a letter "i" cookie cutter) and punched a hole in it before I baked it and strung it on ball-chain with a large jump ring.