... tucked away in the dusty recesses of your cranium: going to Sunday School as a kid and having the lesson of the week taught using flannel boards? Remember flannel boards? And all those little cut out figures dressed in garb of the era? With cloth backing designed to adhere to the pale blue flannel on the big covered board sitting up on an easel for all the little people with minute attention spans circled up on the cold hard linoleum floor.
Wonderful stories with characters from Old and New: misbehaving, never satisfied Adam and Eve; the chosen people living as slaves in Egypt; amazing route to safety through parted waters; people who trekked around in the desert for forty years, griping and complaining; older brothers envious of their father's love for a younger sibling; shepherds defeating giant opponents; ancient kings and warriors good and bad. Strangers with big hearts: Samaritans who would do The Right Thing for the Right Reasons. Tales of a baffling pregnancy, birth in a barn, donkey rides in the dark. Parables told with small paper cut-out characters for illustration to help small children visualize those men, women, children, sheep,camels, donkeys, living nomad lives from thousands of years ago.
When I was substituting at a school on the south side of town, a visitor came in the classroom to read to the students. She brought several books age-appropriate for the four-year-olds, as well as an assortment of visuals to help keep them interested. It's pretty obvious you need to have lots of tricks up your sleeve when reading to a group of kids with the attention span of a flea. This group, raised in the age of electronics, hand held devices passed over for distraction in the car driving for ten minutes, was quite attentive to the reader as she pulled characters out of her bag to place on the flannel board.
Well... me too! But for a different reason than to wonder: what makes those animals stick on there?
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