Obedience- My Lesson Plans

My mother was my greatest teacher throughout my life. One of the things I remembered from her teachings was that much of it was done through repetition. I remember when she would sit us down during devotion time and she would open up to Genesis 3 (again), how I would say, "But Mom, you already taught us this." She would always say that it was important for her to teach it to us again so we would not forget it. And she was right. To this day, I can remember our lessons on Genesis 3.


I decided that in my teaching of Addie I would take the same approach. Repetition would be key to her learning the spiritual concepts that I want her to hold on to. Repetition was used throughout the Your Baby Can Read DVDs, and now my baby can read!


Last week and this week, we have been working on obedience with Addie. Now that her vocabulary and understanding are growing, we felt that it was important for her to not only obey us, but understand what obeying means.


As part of that training, I tried to work most of our lesson times around the concept of obedience.


For our devotions, she and I have been going over the account of Adam and Eve and their choice to disobey God's command to not eat from the tree in the middle of the garden every morning. My favorite moment last week was when Addie had her baby sitting in the baby carriage with her Bible opened up to the account of Adam and Eve. She was "telling" the baby the story (in her own words, of course. You should have seen my dad's reaction to this scene!) and when she came to the fruit part, she began hitting the page and saying, "No, no, no!" very loudly. She got it!


During devotions is when a review of the verse Ephesians 6:1 fits in well. By beginning the day with the verse, it makes it easier to pull it back out when obedience issues need to be dealt with later on. We also end our devotions with prayer, asking God to help us to be obedient throughout the day.


I also made a simple worksheet using the Adobe Photoshop program and some of the free downloads I have found online. If you want the PDF for this worksheet, email me. I would be happy to send it to you! I tried uploading it to this post, but for some reason it was not accepted as a PDF. It is simply the word "obey". We use this page to review these particular lowercase letters, the colors blue, green, red, and yellow, sight word review (since we are using the Your Baby Can Read curriculum which is based on the learning of sight words), and following directions. I have one printed out for every day. Side note: Don't you just love her art work! The only marks I made on her page were the boxes above the letters to remind myself of the order I wanted to review the colors in.

My method of doing this is as follows:

1. We go over the word. I run my finger under the word as I say it. Then I have her say the word. It definitely sounds cuter when she says it. They other day when Aunt Elsa was over, I showed Addie the worksheet and she said, "Obey!"


2. I grab the four colors which I have already set aside (From my years of teaching experience, you do not want there to be any dead time while you run to grab some supplies or get that one thing. Any dead time and you lose their attention and that is end of the lesson.) and hold them in my hand. I tell her to find the green crayon (or whichever color I happen to choose first on that day. By varying the color choices, they will not memorize the answers.). When she pulls it out, we high five and cheer. Then I tell her to color the "O". We do this with each color and letter.


3. I flip over the paper and let her scribble to her heart's content.


4. Our movie for these two weeks has been Veggie Tales Pistachio which is based around children obeying their parents.

Right now, I am praying about what the lesson for next two weeks will be. There are so many concepts in God's Word that I want her to know right now. But I just have to keep reminding myself that it takes time. It will come.

Edit from this morning: As she was watching the Pistachio video during breakfast, I knew she "got" the concept of obedience. When Pistachio comes to life in the movie and begins jumping around, Addie started shouting "Obey! Obey!" Oh, it was a good moment!