inside the ark they were warm and dry
I finally cut out the pieces to Noah's ark. It took three days with Harvey's help, and by help I mean he picked out the colors to distinguish the characters and that's why everyone kind of looks like they're in an 80s workout video.
get those children out of the muddy muddy
Harvey also sewed the rainbow, which is to say he drove the pedal of the machine while I turned the fabric wildly to try to get the stitches to curve at Harvey's warp speed (I don't let him use my computerized sewing machine for obvious reasons, but that means the only speed control he has is how hard he puts down on the pedal. And he's three - gradual gradation is not really his thing.)
We did Noah's ark on the flannel board two and a half times this week, the half when Zion abruptly ripped all the pieces off the board and Harvey announced, "Let's go outside!" I'm eager to move away from Noah and get on to the tower of Babel (skipping Noah getting drunk and exposing himself to his sons; that's a lesson for high school). Harvey thinks Noah's ark is a bit scary, because of the giants. He is very happy when they get killed in the flood, and he relishes wiping them off the board when the waters rise. But he notes that we need more animals to die too in the flood. Yeah, I think he's learned enough here.
I'm not very spiritually moved by the Noah story. I think God related to prehistoric peoples in a way that probably made sense to previous ages more than it makes sense to us. I'm also not totally happy with this felt set-up. I wanted to press the point that Noah wasn't the only person in the ark, but my zeal to represent his family and then following fatigue at cutting out figures gives the impression that there were more people saved than drowned in the story. Which is false. Also, it's a bit tricky to fit all those guys in the ark and shut the door and have the thing still stick to the flannel board. I'm thinking ahead to IMPORTANT stories in Genesis (who's playing God now!) and I think for big groups of people like Joseph's brothers I'll cut them out as a crowd block and then decorate them some way that's not so neon.
Harvey seems to be learning a lot from these stories. Preschool homeschool isn't so hard, I realize. Just the other day I asked Harvey what he wanted to do for school at home this year, and he said, "Well, we already did weaving, and making a sweater, and numbers.. so I don't know! We already did everything!"