The Tower of Babel

Today we studied about Nimrod and the Tower of Babel. Nimrod did not walk with God and he convinced those who followed him to build a tower to the heavens to reach God. These people were excellent at communication and could pretty much accomplish anything. God saw how far they were getting with the tower and decided to confound their language to make their task impossible because he didn't want them to reach heaven. None of us are worthy to reach heaven especially Nimrod and his followers. With their languages confused God dispersed them about the earth.

Along with this lesson we each had to go into a separate space and draw a picture of something we wanted to build with the various blocks we have in Jade's toy box. I told them to make them fairly simple. Then we all had to work together to build each persons building without looking at the picture and each of us speaking in a different "language". Eden could only speak in "O" (oooo, owww, owe), Joey in "A" (aaaaa, awww, ay) and I in "E" (eeeee, ewe, eh). We had to try to convey to one another how to build each structure. I went first and I had the kids do a basic pyramid of blocks. At first I was trying to tell the kids to pull a certain type of block out of the basket and it took a while to get going. Then I started laying the blocks out and asking them in my language to lay them as I did. We eventually go the structure built, but it took much longer than it would have if I could have simply said "put the blocks like this".

Joey's structure was next and when we did his I kept trying to put different blocks on top instead of the blocks he wanted us to use. We all had a hard time understanding. Again we accomplished building the structure, but it wasn't easy

Eden's was last. In this picture you see Joey trying to place a big block onto Eden's structure and clearly it didn't belong as you can see from Eden's reaction. Hand motions played a huge role in our communication.

Eden's structure was more complicated to build than Joey's or mine. Here is a picture of her structure completed along with her original "blueprint". Hers took us much longer to complete and we couldn't accomplish the steps on the side she had originally wanted. This was an interesting and fun activity and I think both kids really grasped the frustration the residents of Babel must have felt once they couldn't communicate well.