Elijah and the Ravens Craft & a Breakthrough in Our School Schedule

My children and I use Tapestry of Grace for our history curriculum.  We’re currently in Year 1, Unit 3.

(Just as a reminder, I have an almost 7-year-old, just turned 5-year-old, almost 3-year old and the baby who is 15 months.)

Honestly?  I’ve struggled to keep up with history this year.  I just couldn’t figure out how and where to fit it in.  But it’s one of my son’s favorite subjects, so I’ve made tweaks here and there trying to make our schedule work.  Usually we would complete all of the subjects that I deemed ‘essential’ and then it was time for school to be over for the day.  History may or may not have been completed later in the afternoon.  Despite my being prepared to teach it, it seemed more of like an afterthought.

The Breakthrough

Finally the light bulb came on last week: We’ll do history first thing every day.  That way we’ll be sure to include it every day it’s on my schedule.  Why didn’t I think of that before?!

Since our history is Bible-based, I decided to take a break from our usual Bible study (which we all love) and focus more on using our Bible passages from the suggested readings in TOG.

Elijah and the Ravens

This past week, we studied a couple of things: the end of Solomon’s reign and the Divided Kingdom, Elijah and his interactions with Ahab and Jezebel, and then Elijah being taken to heaven and Elisha stepping into his place.

In trying to involve my little girls more in our history and Bible study, I searched for a craft that would go along with our study this week.  I finally found this raven craft from DLTK.  It was perfect!

Not only did we learn quite a bit about ravens and how they behave, but we also learned that God takes care of us with things we would never even dream of.  I doubt that Elijah imagined that God would take care of his need for food by sending ravens every evening!  That account in the Bible gave us so many interesting things to talk about in how God takes care of our every need.  It gave us a chance to give thanks to God for all of the unusual ways he takes care of our own little family.

Even though crafts are my children’s favorite aspect of school, they occasionally make crafts and then just leave them on the table.  They may or may not come back to them later.

But these ravens?  They are still playing with them!

They pretended to steal eggs from another animal (ravens are smart and use the buddy system) and they ran around in their ‘raven family’.

Isn’t it so fulfilling to see your children really get a concept that you’re studying?  It just warmed my Mama’s heart to see them pretend to carry food to the imaginary Elijah in our living room.  I loved to see them pretend to be a little raven family sitting in their nest.

Good memories were made this past week during our school time for them and for me.  I’m so grateful that I get to stay home with these fabulous little people.  They are so fascinating and just fun to be around.  All of our school days definitely don’t flow as well as those of this past week, and that makes me even more appreciative when they do.

Have you changed one little thing in your schedule and it seemed to make a huge difference?

Resources used in our study this past week:
– Paper Bag Crow craft from DLTK – we colored everything black since a raven’s beak, legs and feet are all black
– Article on ravens from National Geographic
– Article from All About Birds – love their ‘Cool Facts’ section

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Lauren Hill

Lauren Hill is a Christian mom to 5, ages 19 to 7. She homeschools her children in the classical education tradition and is currently in her 15th year of homeschool. She creates engaging worksheets and hands-on printable activities for Preschool and Elementary age children to supplement their daily studies.

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