October 2016 – While reading the story of Adam and Eve, my 2-year old daughter made an interesting observation, “Snake is naughty, mommy! He need spanking!”

She also made the observation that after Adam and Eve were naughty it made them very sad. All this opened up a great conversation about what it means to be naughty and how being naughty makes people sad and may require “spankings”.

As a hands-on project we worked together to make a snake out of construction paper. Nothing too complicated. But we had fun coloring it together and talking about the “naughty snake” in the story.

When the snake was done my daughter insisted that we had to hang it up on the wall. The moment I got it hung up on display she started hitting the snake and repeating, “Naughty snake! He needs spankings!”


















































When she was through with “spanking” her snake, she asked if we could make Adam and Eve. So I pulled out some more construction paper and we worked together to make a little garden for Adam and Eve.

We drew a snake in the tree and my daughter had a lot of fun gluing purple “forbidden fruit” in the tree. We made the tree to have a flap to hide the snake which she thought was really cool.










































Then we set to work drawing and cutting out the characters of Adam, Eve, and the Angel with the flaming sword.





























The bushes on our garden picture were glued in a way that would create pockets behind them, so Adam and Eve can hide behind the bushes, the way they hide from God in the story.




























We had a lot of fun creating the garden scene together and talking about the characters and the story in greater detail. Then she went on to play with it on her own, and it actually kept her pretty occupied for much of the afternoon.

And even then, for days after she kept asking me, “where’s my Adam and Eve?”. It was such a simple paper craft but for a good week or two they were her favorite toys!