Thursday, February 26, 2015

The Empty Tomb - An Interactive Easter Lesson




Last Easter I wanted to make an empty tomb for the children to enter for our Easter lesson. I had already covered our puppet stage with stone paper for Daniel and the Lions’ Den. I simply converted it into the tomb.

How to make the cave:



  1. First, I cut an opening in the front for the tomb entrance. I saved the paper I cut to cover the stone I made in step 2.
  2.  I found a large piece of flat cardboard and covered it with the paper from the opening. I needed to add some extra paper to complete the job. This was the stone that was rolled away.
  3. Finally, I covered the rest of the puppet theater with black tablecloths to make the cave effect. You could use plastic ones from the dollar store, black sheets, or even black bulletin board paper if you have it.
That was it. I added an old
pew inside for the ledge that they laid Jesus' body on. Then we did the lesson.


The Lesson:


I had 3 crosses from another lesson, so I used these. I drew stick figures of men on white roll paper, cut them out and stuck them to the 3 crosses. I used plastic tack on the one with Jesus so he could be easily removed. I also glued some white poster board behind part of his body to add stiffness.

I had "Jesus" on the middle cross. We took him down for the lesson and buried him in the tomb. I never found his "body" after that, so that is why the third cross is empty for this picture.

Then we read the story from the scriptures. At the appropriate time in the story, we removed the body of Jesus from the cross, wrapped it in some white sheeting and laid it in the tomb.


We went into a classroom after that and spent the next “day and night” there (about 5 minutes to give time for my helpers to change the scene at the tomb). We pretended to eat a meal and then sleep noisily.  On “Sunday” morning, we left the classroom to go see if we could move the stone and see Jesus’ body. 


Of course the body was not there, but an angel was. He told us that Jesus had risen from the dead and he told us where we could go to find him. So we followed his directions and found Jesus alive (one of the adults in our church agreed to play the part). He told us to go and tell others about him and then we went back to the classroom to discuss what had happened.
 
 

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