Fall of Jerusalem lesson

The Fall of Jerusalem lesson is an easy one to make hands-on, all you need is a large supply of Legos and some willing helpers, oh, and a Bible or maybe your Sunday School lesson.  All I know is my kids always love when we have a Lego History lesson, and they can run to get Legos for our homeschool history lesson.

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Future Ticia pops into this Fall of Jerusalem lesson

I have since I first posted this redone the Fall of Jerusalem lesson since we cycled back to Ancient History and Mystery of History 1, so I’m going to add in the elements from our second lesson as relevant.

Hi, Future Ticia 2023 here, I’m updating yet again and so now I’m adding in a few more bits and pieces here as well.

Fall of Jerusalem lesson resources

As I mentioned, we used and then followed up with the (when completing in 3rd grade)

• Mystery of History 1
• LEGOS
• LEGO minifigures– it’s sad LEGO is discontinuing sets like this which are so good for educational purposes
• notebooking pages (used when completing this lesson in 3rd grade)
• Ancient Mesopotamia Unit- I have to finish this, but I have my own notebooking pages I used when we were in middle school and high school

And here are a few YouTube videos, one thing not possible when I first wrote this lesson in 2011.

This next video is more from a Biblical history perspective.

And this one is from Jerusalem Watch, which is interesting to me.

If you are ever looking this up on your own make sure to phrase it as Siege of Jerusalem 587 BC, you have to add in the date because there are at least 3 more events that could be called the Siege of Jerusalem or Fall of Jerusalem.

Sadly I don’t know of any particularly good picture books for this topic.

Back to what I was saying

My kids are rather enamored with acting out their history with Legos.  They ask to do it every single lesson.  Which doesn’t always work out.

But, this time it did, and I accidentally chose a Lego board that was perfect for the fall of Jerusalem.  I’ll say it was on purpose.

The Fall of Jerusalem lesson (as acted out by Legos)

The Babylonians came to attack Jerusalem.  But, they didn’t know that Jerusalem had an interior water supply, so it was very hard to defeat them.

The second time around we stopped the lesson to look up the well Hezekiah had built and how long the tunnel was (the second picture has a glare, sorry about that).

Finally they were successful in defeating part of Jerusalem, but they did not completely knock down the walls.  They carried off many of the Israelites to Babylon.

They attacked a second time, and more people were carried off, but they still did not successfully defeat Jerusalem.

Finally, on the third try they were able to defeat and destroy Jerusalem.  They carried off all the treasure and kept it in their storehouses.

Along the way, after the first siege, Babylon installed two puppet kings: Jehoaichin and Zedekiah.  They were still kings of Judah but they had to do what Babylon wanted.

We talked about them more the second time around than we did the first.  It’s amazing the difference between two kids in K and 3-year-old and two 3rd graders and a 1st grader.

The second time around we also filled out one of the Mystery of History notebooking pages  (oh wait, it does, just my original link no longer worked) for the lesson.

The kids are slowly adapting to writing more and more as they go through the lessons.

Extending this lesson for older kids

Topics for older kids to research:

• Hezekiah’s tunnel
• how sieges are done
• Nebuchadnezzar (obviously)
• puppet king or client kingdom

Future Ticia 2023 added an actual proper Pinterest image, and now I’m about to add in some other lessons you might be interested in.

Some more ideas to think about

• How do octopus move?
• 5 Senses lesson for kindergarten
• How to write a research paper
• Skeleton Unit
• Morning Time for Middle School
• A Christmas Carol book club

I added six ideas, so I had two ideas from each grade we covered this lesson.

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