For the Love of Camels and Rebekah

After spending one year in the New Testament, I find myself back in the old with a whole set of new children. I have visuals from some of these lessons, but the children are younger now, so I am finding that I have to change things up.

I always start to prepare by reading the Bible story first. As I read, I try to visualize the story happening in my mind's eye. When I read this story of Abraham's servant going to find Isaac's wife, I was struck by the fact that he took ten camels. The Bible is very specific to mention that. It is also very specific that Abraham's servant watched closely as Rebekah drew water for those ten camels. Why? That was a lot of work! A camel can drink 20 to 25 gallons in 10 minutes and up to 40 gallons in one session. And there were 10 of them. The camels are key in understanding the story.

I downloaded pictures of camels that were labeled for reuse and printed them on cardstock. I always flip the images so I can paste them together front and back and then they can face any direction for telling stories. Some of my older figures are not double sided. Here is the link for my camel doc. You will need to print 5 copies. That will give you 5 of each design, so the camels are a little different.

I made a well by taping together five sides of stone around an upside down bowl. I put a piece of blue felt over the bowl. You could even use the bowl right side up and put real water in it, if you don't mind a mess. Here is the link for the well pieces and the clay jar for Rebekkah. I added some trees from a train set we used to have just to give a little effect.

Phillip Martin clip art. This is "Isaiah," but you could use it for Isaac

I used figures I had purchased to make the story figures of the servant, Rebekah and her family. These figures are no longer available for purchase, but were copyrighted. Phillip Martin has some wonderful free Bible images you can download on his website. Note that you are just looking at the first page when you click this link. There are 21 additional pages you can click onto.

Kiddie pool served as our well, minus the toys. We used drinking cups to fill a bucket from the "well."

For a learning activity, we had a children's swimming pool partly filled, cups and an empty bucket. Children had to use the cups to fill up the bucket, as many times as we could before the class ended. When it was full, we hauled it to an old sink and "watered the camels." They loved this activity.

Additional props used to tell this story:

• I tied up bundles of small presents in pieces of cloth.
• Children untied the bundles and explored the presents.
• Little boxes from a doll house collection of Christmas presents
• Gems and pretty stones to represent jewelry (spray paint small stones gold and silver)
• I had one huge fake gem stone in a pretty bag for the kids to explore