Hide the Baby (Moses) and Paper Baskets

Our Bible story this week was about Miriam and baby Moses. The girls are familiar with the story of Moses in the basket (for a while there they would call any baby they saw in any sort of basket-like thing Moses). Normally this story puts an emphasis on Moses and how god was able to protect him. Obviously an important point, but I wanted the girls to think a bit about Miriam and how she might have felt....annoyed, scared, worried, frustrated. We don't really know, but some of those are things the girls feel when dealing with Eli!

So after reading and discussing the story we played a little game called hide the baby. First we tried using our Sock Monkey Game.

Basically one of the girls hid the baby, and we each chose a card to try and figure out what room the baby was in.

The cards say things like "in a room with a lamp" or "in a room with a desk." Whoever hid the baby says yes or no, and you can put the card in the appropriate pile for reference later. Some of the cards say "go look!" Whoever gets one of these gets to get up and look in the room of their choice until the timer runs out (I think it is a one minute timer).

When the girls hid the baby, it was really pretty easy to find. When I hid the baby they had a hard time. We went through all the cards, and they still couldn't find it! They narrowed it down to the correct room though. We went to the room and played the hot and cold game until they found it. So you could probably do the entire game using hot and cold if you wanted to.

After the girls got tired of the game we decided to try and make some paper heart baskets. So we started with 2 sheets of construction paper and folded it in half.

Then we cut that in half to make long pieces of paper.

2 halves of the paper. You can imagine they would be long rectangles.

Take one of each color and lay the in the shape of a heart with the folded side at the point of the heart (otherwise it won't make a basket).

I drew a pencil line across the pink where it met the purple, so I knew how far I could cut.

Lay both your rectangles together and cut strips starting at the folded side and going up to your line. You can draw the lines on before you cut, so they are easy. I did not do it, and we had some problems later. Maybe even lines would have helped some. You can round the top now or once it is finished!

Now for the weaving part, because the strip is folded you will have to weave around and through the other strips. The point is to make a basket, so the inside needs to be hollow. It is confusing for me to read, but when you start looking at it in your hands it makes sense. The fold creates two sides, so the other piece must go through the center. I promise it will make sense when you try it!

Somehow we had two edge strips that would not fit! I have no idea how, was it because I didn't exactly measure my strips? I don't know, but I decided to cut them off. With the girls baskets I waited until this point and had them cut the extra strip off while rounding off the top section.

You can see it makes a basket!

This was actually frustrating for the girls because they kept getting stuck on how to weave each piece. So I made them little flat hearts they could weave easier. Same idea, but it is flat, so you just weave over and under. I glued the top of the hearts to the paper to keep everything together.