Deborah

This story is always a favorite of the girls in class because:

1. Deborah is a tough female judge,

2.  Deborah helps the head of the army (Barak) who is too afraid to go to battle without her, and

3.  Another woman (Jael) defeats the bad guy!

Even the boys love when the chariots get mired in the  mud, the bad guys run off, and Jael tricks Sisera with a glass of milk, a "safe" place to sleep, and a tent peg through his head!  For some reason, they are also fascinated that she sat under a palm tree to judge. :)

At the beginning of class, we traced their handprints and made a "palm" tree.  The trunk is just craft sticks glued to the page.  At first, that is all we put on the page, and I ask them to listen and see what (or who!) goes under the tree.  Following the story, they get to draw Deborah.

When I tell the story, I use these cheesy little "puppets" I made and laminated.   I purposely don't make them look realistic (as if I could draw them realistically if I wanted to!) because we talk often about how we don't know what they looked like.  Kids this age get hung up on thinking they know what characters look like because of pictures in a book, and then they can get a little panicky if they see one that's different than theirs at home, so I always remind them this is just a picture.  :) 

Anyway, I pass out each puppet to a kid and tell the story.  When their characters are discussed in the story, they hold them up and, if they want, they "act out" the story with them.  If I have more than 4 kids that want to be the characters, we just tell the story more than once! 

Following the story, they add their "Deborah" under their handprint palm tree.   Notice in the sample the Deborah looks almost identical to my "puppet" because it was my sweet boy and he wanted to be just like Mommy.  :)

For a review, we put this on the wall:

It is just a long piece of brown paper (in this case, a scrap of contact paper we used to cover our tables) used for a palm tree trunk, and laminated "palm leaves" with questions on them.  If I did it over again, I would color both sides of the leaves and turn them face down so they couldn't see the questions, BUT, so few of mine can read at this point that it's not THAT big of a deal.  Anyway, the kids each come up and pick a leaf off the tree and answer the question.  If they can't answer it, their classmates can help.   We continue until all the leaves are gone.  Usually they want to play again.   Then, we staple up our word wall words on the bulletin board.  As I pull out a word (laminated on a palm tree picture!), they have to tell me what that word means in our story.   Repetition, repetition, repetition!  :)