Joshua and the Battle of Jericho

We started doing family devotions each evening in February.  I wanted to do the same story for a month to help my son, then 19 months, catch on to what we were doing.  I also wanted to pick a story that would be easy to act out.  I got some Bible story books at the Dollar Store a few months ago, and Joshua and the Battle of Jericho seemed to fit with my sons current interest in building blocks.

So,  devotional time began.

We started each night by taking out our "Bible Box" which contained the little book and my son's set of alphabet blocks.  Then we would build a tower to represent Jericho.  The book talked about Joshua being strong, so we'd show our muscles.  When the story mentioned Jericho, we pointed to the tower we had built.  For six days the Israelites marched around Jericho, so we blew on our imaginary trumpets six times.  For the seventh day we blew our trumpets one final time, pseudo-shouted "Yeah God!" and my son knocked over the tower.  We ended each night with a simple prayer asking God to help us be strong and follow his commands like Joshua and then we'd clean up the blocks and start our bedtime routine.

To begin with, my son didn't really understand what we were doing, and more than a few times Jericho was knocked down a little early.  But he really liked blowing his imaginary trumpet and by the end of the month, he was "reading" the story to us, complete with trumpet blasts, "Yeah!" and knocking down Jericho at the end,  each action on the appropriate page of the book.  It was one of the cutest things I've ever seen.

We did keep reading the story through the start of March rather than switching to another story for just a week before starting our lenten devotion - the Lenten Cross.