Starting at the Beginning...Genesis 1:1

Bible verses for today: 
Genesis 1:1-5   (NIV)  "In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.  Now the earth was formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters.  And God said, 'Let there be light,' and there was light.  God saw that the light was good, and he separated the light from the darkness.  God called the light 'day,' and the darkness he called 'night'.  And there was evening, and there was morning - the first day."

Memory verse for this week: 
Genesis 1:1  In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.

Thought for the week (for our 2-year-old, Andrew):
God created the world, and God created you!

Activity: 
I'm going to talk with the kids about what the earth was like before creation and have them draw a picture of what they think it would have looked like pre-creation.  The verses for today use the words " formless" and "empty".  These verses also say that God created light, but eludes to the fact that the darkness was already there.  It also says that God was "hovering over the waters" (along with later verses on creation).  Since God hadn't yet revealed the dry land (verse 9), I'm guessing that everything was covered with water.   Everything in these verses are in stark contrast to what we see now, and can be pretty hard for us (kids especially!) to imagine.  As a reinforcer for the lesson, while each of the kids are in the bathtub tonight, we're going to talk about the dark, watery beginning of the world.  We'll probably turn off the lights and imagine what it might have been like.  This is going to be a little difficult to imagine, since the sky wasn't formed until day 2!

Updated post:
How it went...We'll have to work on attention spans in upcoming devotion times.  The kids are so energetic that Kiera (age 6) had trouble not focusing on everything else she wants to do.  A perfect time to learn about committing time to God, I guess!  Kiera also seemed to enjoy the idea of what things were like before creation, though she's in a hurry to get to the later days of creation.  When we started reading today's verses, she said, "Oh, I know what this is about!  We're going to learn about Adam and Eve!" :)  Memory verses are new to Kiera.  She's excited about memorizing things from the Bible, so that makes me all the more excited to teach her.

Coming Up:

I'll be blogging about a Creation Box in the upcoming days.  This is the end-result of our Creation Box (animals were removed to give a better view).  I wanted to go back and add it to this post so that everyone could see the end-result of ours before starting on their own.  The orange thing in the middle is a tree, and the blue-green in the sky is a cloud.  Our hand-drawn tree has flower stickers on it, as does the grass.