Michigan Camp Meeting 2016: The Harvest is Great

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Michigan Conference of Seventh-day Adventists

God's First Book, Our First Classroom

Angela Boothby Frauenfelder

1. The Outdoors-An Integral Part of Abundant Life

2. Teaching Science & Math in the Outdoors

3. Teaching Language Arts in the Outdoors

4. Take Your Family Outdoors

5. Connecting with the Creator in His Creation

Dear Lord, I praise you so much that today is Friday, which means your Sabbath is coming.

And Lord, I ask that you still are in minds and that we may focus on what you want us to learn and that we may have a heart full of you that we may be overflowing to share with others.

I wanted to start with a quote there on the top of your page.

It's from the book Education, page 119 and 120, and I know that I've shared a lot of quotes in the book Education, but this isn't just in the book Education.

If you read Adventist Home, if you read Ministry of Healing, you're gonna find all over where it talks about the importance of using creation to learn more about God.

So I'll read, He alone who recognizes in nature his Father's handiwork, who in the richness and beauty of the earth reads the Father's handwriting.

He alone learns from the things of nature their deepest lessons and receives their highest ministry.

Only he can fully appreciate the significance of hill and vale, river and sea, who looks upon them as an expression of the thought of God, a revelation of the Creator.

Many illustrations of nature are used by the Bible writers, and as we observe the things of the natural world, we shall be enabled, under the guiding of the Holy Spirit, more fully to understand the lessons of God's Word.

It is thus that nature becomes a key to the treasure house of the Word." Don't you love that?

Nature becomes a key to the treasure house of the Word.

Children should be encouraged to search out in nature the objects that illustrate Bible teachings and to trace in the Bible the similitudes drawn from nature.

They should search out, both in nature and in Holy Writ, every object representing Christ and those also that he employed in illustrating truth.

Thus may they learn to see him in tree, in vine, in lily, in rose, in sun, in star.

They may learn to hear his voice in the song of birds, in the sighting of the trees, in the rolling thunder, in the music of the sea, in every object, and nature will repeat to them his precious lessons.

To those who thus acquaint themselves with Christ, the earth will nevermore be a lonely and desolate place.

It will be their Father's house, filled with the presence of Him who once dwelt among men." Isn't that incredibly powerful and exciting?

I don't know how I missed it until I understood it and I started doing it.

And then I went back and I read this and I said, wow, I've been doing this.

I do walk around on a day right now and I just can't help but say different Bible verses.

As I see a tree, as I see a sun, as I see a bird, I just can't help it now.

I'm seriously feeling like I'm walking in the presence of the Lord.

And Alan White says that heaven can begin here on earth.

And I understand because I feel like I just have Jesus walking next to me all through the day because there's nature all around.

So today I want to hopefully teach you guys how to do it.

At the end of the papers I told you about a book at the bottom, The Heart Mender.

All right, Sally Stribe wrote a book for children called Treasures by the Sea.

And what she does is she goes, 2 kids come to visit and she takes them on special walks always by the ocean and takes different shells and teaches them about the shell and the creature that lives there and then she makes spiritual lessons.

And as a kid actually at Goebbels Junior Academy we had Sally Stribe come and do a presentation And she gave us each our own little treasure container with sand on the bottom, and she would give us a shell each day and talk about the object lesson.

So it's amazing to me how I was exposed to this as a child and I still missed it.

I still didn't fully grasp what that quote was saying.

So maybe some of you haven't fully grasped either what that quote was saying, but just wait.

Hopefully at the end of this you'll be like, oh, I'm so excited to go study my Bible, because that's how I feel now.

But what started me on doing this, wasn't even my master's program, was the book The Heart Mender.

So she kind of went through a very traumatic experience, I think a divorce and some other things.

And it's called The Heart Mender, and the only reason I picked it up was that it was at the ABC and it was on sale a couple years ago.

And sometimes I just pick up random books.

And in it, she talked about doing that and how looking at objects in nature was very healing.

Plus, her journey was just really inspiring to me.

As a woman, I definitely suggest this book.

Maybe men would like it too, I don't know.

But the heart mender was really what got me started on this looking at nature and my Bible in a different way.

The way I'm gonna do this class is at the beginning I'm gonna give you a couple ideas for your children and what I did as a school teacher and then I'm gonna switch gears and show you how to apply it to your life and I believe once you, remember we learn by doing, and also our children learn by our example.

So when we are passionate about these Bible verses, and when they apply to our personal lives, our kids are not gonna be able to resist, and they're not gonna be able to resist catching the fire that's in your heart, because it's just going to shine forth.

Because you're going to be excited about, oh, look at this verse I found, honey.

So I'm going to switch gears and not focus on the children for very long.

So at the beginning of the paper, I just gave you a couple ideas.

1, we've talked about this quite a bit, about a sit spot.

So encourage them to have a special devotional place outside, whether it be, they always go under a tree.

They talk about to have regular devotions, we need to have a spot that we always go to every morning to make it a routine.

So pick an outside spot for them to have a sit spot to do their devotions.

And even us as adults can have a sit spot.

Always under this certain tree, always on this bench.

Have them have a special chair or a special blanket that they take to their sit spot.

And then give them an Ellen White quote, if you have an older child, give them an Ellen White quote to journal about or give them a Bible verse.

And then even older kids love to illustrate.

And They say when you draw something, you understand it more and you apply it more because you're trying to think, okay, what is this verse really talking about?

So what I did in my classroom is I've showed some of you these journals and I found them at Target.

I don't know, honestly, where else, maybe just look on Amazon.

It's a regular composition book, but it has the little kid lines, and then the top half is blank.

So every week, I'd have the kiddos write their memory verses, they'd sit there and copy it, and then I would turn on some classical music and they'd have to draw a picture to the Bible verse.

So that's an idea that you could do, is start your week with a special focus for your Bible verses, and then just have them draw a picture, but just have them do it outside.

And just, it'd be kind of interesting to see what kind of pictures they draw outside as compared to inside.

Because remember we talked about that on Monday about how our invention people and the new thinking people of the age were inspired by nature, compared to now we're inspired by 4 walls and man's creations.

So just, I think it'd be interesting to see what kind of drawings they come up with outside compared to inside.

And it's not necessarily even relating nature to the Bible verse, it's just having them be outdoors.

On Friday, have any of you guys heard of Sabbath celebration?

Sabbath celebration was started in our conference.

I'm not really sure the whole story of how it got started.

And What some people do in their classrooms is they talk about the 6 days of creation and then they light candles and talk about them and then Like the seventh 1 and say they're starting the Sabbath.

Well, I decided to do a little switch on it because growing up a seventh day Adventist sometimes Sabbaths were not always the best day because you had to sit in church, and then there was all these things you couldn't do.

And I'm sad to say that's the way I felt.

And so I started calling it Sabbath Celebration, and it happened at the end of school on Friday.

I gave it about an hour, an hour and a half to have time for it.

We'd first clean up the classroom, because I try to give them the idea of Friday preparation day.

Have you guys seen those books that they go through huge passages?

They do Genesis 1 and 2, they do Psalms 23, they do Isaiah 53.

And it takes the literal Bible verse and puts them into song, and they have the 10 Commandments.

It takes the kids like 10 minutes to sing it, but my kids could sing it.

Back to Menu

Series

God's First Book, Our First Classroom

5. Connecting with the Creator in His Creation

Transcript

Parent Series

Parent Conference

Sponsor

Recorded

Personal Encounters with Jesus

3. Seeing Is Believing: The Man Born Blind

57m

Dunamis

38m

True Education

Communion with God in Nature

1h 1m

Holy Ground

46m

Where We Are in the Stream of Time

43m

Going to Extremes

1h 10m

Talking Points 2nd Quarter 2025: Allusions, Images, Symbols: How to Study Bible Prophecy

09 In the Psalms Part 2

30m

Experiencing the Word of God: How to Turn A Bible into Your Bible

Morning Manna

47m

Breakout Session 4

The Brothel of Babylon

1h 11m

Nature and the Christian Life

37m

What is the Faith That Was Once for All Delivered to the Saints?

Saints Throughout Time & At The End Time

49m

How to Study the Bible- Part 2

50m

Sound Doctrine