Mystery of History Lesson Two: Adam and Eve

At the crux of the Christian message of the Bible is the story of Adam and Eve.  The first man and woman of the world were given everything their heart could desire, except for the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil.  Showing that wanting what one can not have is part and parcel of being human in nature, Eve was unable to show restraint – instead of focusing her attentions on all she had, she allowed herself to be swayed towards that which she was not allowed.  And here starts humankinds’ long relationship with sin.

Is this story true…word for word true?  Or is it merely representative of man’s need for control?  Whatever the case, the message of the gospel does not make sense without at least an arbitrary understanding of how God views sin.  He included in the Bible and therefore to me, as a Christian, it is worth teaching as fact.

Reading about Adam and Eve

I am using our Family Bible to read from because it has fabulous pictures and titbits of extra information which brings everything to life:

We talk about God being the true source of light as light was created before the bodies of light.  We discuss how the world may have been watered by the vapours from subterranean water.  The girls and I discuss the concept of sin; of right and wrong; of just how many things are morally wrong now in the world.  I share with them that at the start, nothing was wrong.  Man had no clue as to evil.  Nothing was judged as being good or evil.  It was all Good.

God tested man by forbidding him to eat from one tree.  Adam and Eve had everything their heart could desire.  They lived in paradise.  They wanted for nothing.  ALL was Good.  And yet….The punishment for their disobedience was Spiritual death.  They now could see the world for its reality outside the Garden of Eden.  God protected them from this, but the moment they chose to disobey was the moment they understood sin.  Interestingly, their response was to cover their naked bodies with fig leaves.  Man was expulsed from the Garden of Eden.  Life would now be difficult for them.  They would no longer be able to walk with God.  Their sin had separated them.  But God had a plan.  The redemptive plan which would play out over the centuries, and be completed by Jesus when He dies and rose again.

Narration and Copy-work about Adam and Eve

The girls created note pages about Adam and Eve.  I photocopied a map of the suspected region where the Garden of Eden may have been situated, which the girls stuck in:

Map Work on Adam and Eve and the Garden of Eden

Four rivers are mentioned as to the location of the Garden of Eden: the Tigris, the Euphrates, the Pison and the Gihon.  The Tigris and Euphrates are names familiar today in the Middle East:

Many scholars place the Garden of Eden around this spot.  Ken Ham, Answers in Genesis, has an interesting video which slams this assumption based on the fact that there are many layers of fossils to be found under these rivers today.  He simply states that we can not possibly know where the Garden of Eden is situated.

Writing Activity for Adam and Eve

We have been learning about writing a descriptive passage about a trip we have taken (in our imagination).  The girls had already written about their trip to Venus, so this time I asked them to write about their trip to the Garden of Eden, maybe mentioning the animals they had created and named during our Creation lesson (B7’s is below):

Name Study on Adam and Eve

I brought out our concordance and together we did a study on the names ‘Adam’ and ‘Eve’.  The girls made a small mini book for each, adding it to their note pages:

Multimedia Options to learn about Adam and Eve

We listened to the following chapters: Introduction, Dates for Creation and Early Man.  This is a very lively CD, and A9 in particular enjoyed listening to it:

Hands On Activities for Learning about Adam and Eve and the Garden of Eden

The first thing the girls did was to make a very colourful Adam and Eve from plasticene.  They did it in two colours making sure they used some of Adam’s colour for Eve to signify Eve being made from Adam:

Afterwards I asked them to create a diorama of the Garden of Eden.  They loved this!

Adam is patting the dog (above left) whilst Eve is being tempted by the serpent wrapped around the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil (below right):

It is of particular importance to point out the elephant dung (black pile above) with the dung fly eating it 😉

Grinding Grain Like Adam and Eve

Once expelled from the Garden of Eden, Life got somewhat tough for Adam and Eve.  Food was much harder to come by, and Adam needed to work the land to produce very little compared to all God had provided in the Garden.  We decided to try our hands at grinding some wheat grain.  Lol.  This was funny!  I borrowed a mortar and pestle from mum so that each girl could have one.  I threw in a handful of grain and told them to get grinding.  Their snack depended on their ability to grind the grain into flour to make some pittas.  They grinded using their hands:

Using their weight:

And even using their sister:

B7 rather humorously told everyone to make her mad so that she could take her anger out on the grain (!):

Half an hour later they were all ground out, and there wasn’t a speck of flour in sight, although that anger of B7’s had obviously helped her a little because at least some of her grain had broken:

 

So we used the grinder, which made short work of it in seconds:

The girls added water and salt, rolled them into balls and rolled them out into mini pitas:

The whole family enjoyed these with some honey on them:

Yer-umm!

Next lesson is about Tubal Cain and Jubal, as we move into the bronze age.  But for now I leave you with a picture of a flint used during the stone age which I managed to capture whilst at the Natural History Museum:

Lesson One: Creation