Last week I finally acquiesced and pulled out the paint. Shudder. I challenged the kids to cover every inch of the paper and to use colors that they might see in the sky so that we could do this project connected with The Three Trees. Both kids had a great time. Sometimes the clean-up from paint is worth the experience. Sometimes not.
By the way, we read both Angela Elwell Hunt’s The Tale of the Three Trees and Elena Pasquali’s The Three Trees. I’d recommend either as good tools to engage your kids’ thinking about who Jesus is and what he came to do. I liked Hunt’s text a bit better, but the illustrations in Pasquali’s book (done by Sophie Windham) gave the kids a lot more to engage with.
Both of those books were way easier to read than Jan Pienowski’s Easter, which solely uses the KJV as its text. The illustrations make the book worth it, but I am very glad I don’t have to rely on the KJV everyday. It was definitely a book I paraphrased as we went through the pages. The illustrations are all done as silhouettes, showing key characters in the events surrounding Easter. I’m amazed at how much emotion and drama can be conveyed with “simple” silhouettes.
I guess this is turning into more of a book review than I meant. Quality Easter books can be difficult to find. Most of the time, we rely on our Bible storybooks or simply read a section from the actual Bible.
We’ve started the resurrection eggs again this year. Caleb is hard at work trying to remember from last year what comes next. Sophia is learning several of the characters and events for the first time. I also printed off a simplified map to trace where all the events take place since there are so many scene changes. As I was doing that I came across this interactive map from Google Earth and the ESV. I found it pretty helpful.
And just to keep things real:
