Nadab and Abihu

My SIL and I have been teaching Sunday School (and Wednesday night) for the 3 & 4 year olds (including Monkey) for just over a week now (two Sundays). Last week’s lesson was a cinch – Rebekah and Isaac – and we found plenty of activities over the internet. The psalm for that week – Psalm 20:7b, “We will boast in the name of the Lord our God” was also an easy one for the kids on Wednesday night.

This Sunday, however, was a little trickier. It’s the story of Nadab and Abihu, from Leviticus. If you’re not familiar with the story, here’s the summary: Nadab and Abihu, Aaron’s sons (Moses’ nephews), are priests. They go through seven days of training to learn to do things exactly as God wants. Well, on Day 8, they use the wrong kind of fire for the altar, something God had been specific about – God, from heaven, burns them up. I think an allusion can be made, as Christians, that disobedience/dishonoring God = fire = hell.

Anyway, for there’s not a lot of preschool-level activities on the internet for this lesson…but I came up with this idea, and to help out anyone like me that might be searching for activities for this lesson, here goes:

I cut out flame shapes out of gold and red wrapping paper (shiny wrapping paper). If you don’t have this sitting around, you could use construction paper for sure, in red, orange, and yellow. You could use glitter on this for the shiny effect of the wrapping paper, but I didn’t want to fool with glitter – it’s such a mess – and I had the wrapping paper around so I used that.

I then printed (from Word document) and cut out slips of paper that stated “Nadab and Abihu chose to disobey God.” You could do whatever is appropriate for your lesson, but for us the quarter focuses on “God Chose Us” and each lesson focuses on choosing or not choosing God, so that’s the phrasing I picked.

Anyway, we let the kids pick background paper (this was heavier weight paper from our church’s resource room) and they glued away. I also carried some extra wrapping paper in case kids wanted to cut their own flames, but we didn’t really have time for this.

Here’s Monkey’s finished product: