Scripture: Judges 1-3
Learning Objectives:
- Students will review how God established Judges to lead the Israelites before they had kings.
- Students will review the importance of learning history so that we can learn from the past.
- Students will interview adults/leaders in their community to learn about its past.
- Students will collaborate to create a presentation based on their interview of a person/ people in their community.
Guiding Question: How can we learn about history from those in our community and present it to others for the future?
Materials: paper, pencil, other creative supplies for student presentations
Procedure: Review the story of Israel’s early judges focusing on how Israel strayed farther from God in subsequent generations. Discuss the importance of learning history and honoring God as the true leader. It is important to recognize how history affects the community so that you can learn from the past. Israel would have benefited from learning from their elders’ wisdom and experiences.
Instruct students to interview people in their community to learn the history of their church or school or other commonly associated organization. Discuss the types of people that would be appropriate to interview and why. As a group, brainstorm good interview questions. Examples: What were your best memories of the ______ (ex. Church)? What challenges did you face? Who were some important leaders? Etc. Encourage them to remember key ideas and write notes. Have students work in groups of 3-4 to create a presentation. This can include a display board, visuals, quotes, stories, artifacts, etc. This can be as simple or elaborate as you like. If time outside of the class is an issue, invite a guest speaker and have students interview them. Then have students choose a way to present the information they learned in small groups. Discuss the importance of sharing history and teaching others. Discuss that who they interview is the primary source and students then become secondary sources. Explain the difference and discuss the advantages and disadvantages of the different types of sources.
Additional Questions:
- How did the interview help you better understand your community? Does it make you want to do things differently?
- How have you seen God at work in your community?
- How did Judges help lead Israel? How is this similar to and different than what you thought judges did? How are they similar or different than your leaders?
- What key information did you learn that you want to teach others later to help them?
Supplemental Activity: Have students create small time capsules that contain objects that symbolize the things that they learned. A canister or shoebox can be filled with pictures, notes, trinkets that represent ideas or events, etc. Students vote on a place to leave the time capsule to be opened later.