Count your blessings

1. Count your blessings ABUNDANCE! Church School Program

2. ABUNDANCECount your blessings Week 1 Overview Psalm8 Butterflies Week 2 Stars Week 3 Grains of Sand Week 4 Birds of the Air Week 5 Fields of Wild Flowers Week 6 Wildlife herds Week 7 Oceans teeming with life Week 8 A World in a Drop of Water Week 9 Snowflakes Week 10 Count your Blessings

3. WEEK 1 Abundance Talk to the children about their week and pray about any concerns. This term our program is called Abundance and we will thinking about the vast numbers of birds, fish, animals, stars, grains of sand which God has createdWe will see that God is the God of every scale from the tiny to the immense.We will see that God gives an abundance of blessings to us. Some are for everybody and some are particularly for a certain person We will be raising our awareness of God’s provisions and counting our blessings (if we can!) and will be amazed what the Lord has done!We will be keeping an Abundance Booklet Show videos Count your blessings Power of ten magnification and Butterflies Read Count your blessings Read Psalm 8 Discuss What does Abundance mean? Discuss the film clips Work on the worksheets Get into a circle and pray for the coming week.

4. Count your many blessings Name them one by one And you will be amazed What the Lord has done!

5. Psalm 8  1O LORD, our Lord, how excellent is thy name in all the earth! who hast set thy glory above the heavens.  2Out of the mouth of babes and sucklings hast thou ordained strength because of thine enemies, that thou mightest still the enemy and the avenger.  3When I consider thy heavens, the work of thy fingers, the moon and the stars, which thou hast ordained;  4What is man, that thou art mindful of him? and the son of man, that thou visitest him?  5For thou hast made him a little lower than the angels, and hast crowned him with glory and honour.  6Thou madest him to have dominion over the works of thy hands; thou hast put all things under his feet:  7All sheep and oxen, yea, and the beasts of the field;  8The fowl of the air, and the fish of the sea, and whatsoever passeth through the paths of the seas.  9O LORD our Lord, how excellent is thy name in all the earth!

6. ABUNDANCE: Profusion, great quantity, plenty, sufficient, loads, wealth

7. VIDEOS Power of 10 magnification • http://micro.magnet.fsu.edu/primer/java/scienceopticsu/powersof10/ • http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A2cmlhfdxuY • Count your blessings http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Ox75f3HWBA

8. BUTTERFLIES VIDEOShttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n1WwV-Tom0M http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dpDFU10gkpw How many kinds of butterflies are there?There are approximately 20,000 species of butterflies in the world. About 725 species have occurred in North American north of Mexico, with about 575 of these occurring regularly in the lower 48 states of the United States, and with about 275 species occurring regularly in Canada http://www.naba.org/qanda.html Numbers of species. Due to their bright colors and visits to flowers, butterflies are the most familiar of insects to humans. There are about 17,500 species of butterflies in the world, and around 750 species in the United States. http://www.si.edu/Encyclopedia_SI/nmnh/buginfo/butterfly.htm

9. ABUNDANCE!

13. WEEK 2 Stars Talk to the children about their week and pray about any concerns. This term our program is called Abundance and we will thinking about the vast numbers of birds, fish, animals, stars, grains of sand which God has createdWe will see that God is the God of every scale from the tiny to the immense.We will see that God gives an abundance of blessings to us. Some are for everybody and some are particularly for a certain person We will be raising our awareness of God’s provisions and counting our blessings (if we can!) and will be amazed what the Lord has done!Show videos about Stars Read Genesis 1:14-19 Read Psalm 8:3-4 Psalm 104:2 Discuss Work on the worksheets Get into a circle and pray for the coming week.

14. 14 And God said, "Let there be lights in the expanse of the sky to separate the day from the night, and let them serve as signs to mark seasons and days and years, 15 and let them be lights in the expanse of the sky to give light on the earth." And it was so. 16 God made two great lights—the greater light to govern the day and the lesser light to govern the night. He also made the stars. 17 God set them in the expanse of the sky to give light on the earth, 18 to govern the day and the night, and to separate light from darkness. And God saw that it was good. 19 And there was evening, and there was morning—the fourth day. GENESIS 1:14-19

15. 3 When I consider thy heavens, the work of thy fingers, the moon and the stars, which thou hast ordained; 4 What is man, that thou art mindful of him? and the son of man, that thou visitest him? Psalm 8:3 - 4

16. Psalm 104 Praise to the Sovereign LORD for His Creation and Providence     1 Bless the LORD, O my soul!     O LORD my God, You are very great:      You are clothed with honour and majesty, 2 Who cover Yourself with light as with a garment,     Who stretch out the heavens like a curtain.

17. STARS • http://astronomy.swin.edu.au/~gmackie/billions.html • http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ds0xYDfvV0c&feature=fvsr • http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A2cmlhfdxuY

21. http://astronomy.swin.edu.au/~gmackie/billions.html To see the Universe in a Grain of Taranaki Sand Glen Mackie [appeared in North and South magazine, May, 1999] It had worried me for a long time. I could hear his voice, ... the total number of stars in the universe is greater than all the grains of sand on all the beaches of the planet Earth. I heard Carl Sagan repeating those words again recently when I looked along a surf beach on the Taranaki coast. Later that evening I looked up at the sky. We are fooled somewhat. Our eyes can only resolve about 5000 of the brightest stars, mostly close to our Sun, and typically within 1000 light years (1 light year is the distance light, travelling with a velocity of 300,000 kilometres per second, covers in 1 year). Our Galaxy however, is probably greater than 100,000 light years in diameter. Hence we can resolve only a very small fraction of our Galaxy with our eyes. As well, whilst our view of the brightest stars is a magnificent panorama we do not get any sense of depth or relative distances of stars. For example, the two bright stars close together, alpha and beta Centauri, (commonly called The Pointers because they guide us to the nearby Southern Cross) are at very different distances. Rigil Kentaurus and Hadar (their common names) are 4.3 and 490 light years distant, respectively. Hardly neighbours! The faint smudge of light we call the Milky Way, easily visible on a dark night, is millions of very faint, distant stars lying in the disk of our Galaxy that our eyes cannot resolve. Dark clouds of dust (microscopic pieces of carbon and silicon) dimms the light of many more stars. Apart from a few neighbouring galaxies (including the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds visible in the southern sky), that appear as faint, fuzzy blobs of light, our naked eye perception of the universe is very myopic.

22. My feet stood on what seemed to be an unfathomable number of sand grains on that wide, long Taranaki beach. If sand grains were stars, a handful of sand thrown into an empty sky could easily replicate what we see. Imagine the brilliant sky you could create with a whole beach of sand! The voice returned. Carl was probably right. He would have done the calculation. Doubts remained though, and I knew it was time to put his voice to rest. I knew some average numbers for stars and galaxies. In many astronomical studies an answer to within an order of magnitude (a factor of 10) is deemed acceptable. Since I had a funny feeling that an average beach may also be hard to describe, I decided to accept order of magnitude accuracy. Our Galaxy, has approximately 400 billion stars. Carl used this number in the book based on his Cosmos television series and I'll stick with it. We define a billion as 10 to the power 9, or 1 with 9 zeroes following it, ie. 1,000,000,000. Big. Is our Galaxy average? Well, it's a spiral, a little less massive than our magnificent Local Group neighbour, Messier 31 in Andromeda. As far as spirals go, it's probably close enough to average. The other galaxies that exist in the universe, large ellipticals and smaller irregular galaxies, tend to have more and less stars, respectively. I'll assume that, in terms of star numbers, our Galaxy represents the average galaxy. What is the total number of galaxies in the universe? Sagan assumed 100 billion. Is that still valid? Recently the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) surveyed, to the faintest levels yet detected, a small area of sky. Extrapolating from the number of galaxies detected by HST to that expected over the whole sky, I calculate 130 billion galaxies, slightly larger than Sagans estimate. Then the number of stars in the universe is 400 billion x 130 billion, or about 50,000 billion billion. A billion billion. That's 1,000,000,000,000,000,000. So, grasp the concept of a billion billion, then think of 50 thousand of those. Easy! What are the dimensions of an average, sandy beach on Earth? I was lucky. I know a Coastal Geomorphologist (doesn't everyone?) who provided some estimates. Take 360,000 kilometres of coast (the total coastline of the world is about 1 million kilometres, of which about 36 percent is sandy), mix with an average beach width of 50 metres (high to low tide lines), and add a dash of average beach depth of 4 metres. The diameters of sand grains range from about 0.1 to 2 millimetres. We'll adopt an average diameter of 0.5 millimetres. Lets stack them simply, one on top of another (not very likely in a beach I admit), so that 8000 fit into 1 cubic centimetre. Drum roll please. The total number of sand grains on our Earth beach is then 600 billion billion. But wait!, I hear some of you remarking about sand dunes and sand below the low tide mark. To placate you worriers I'm happy to increase my initial estimate by a factor of 3. That gives me a grand total of about 2000 billion billion grains of sand on Earth.

23. The stars win! Carl was right, ... maybe. The excess factor (the number of stars divided by the number of grains) of 50,000/2000 or 25 is greater than an order of magnitude, but only just. My individual assumptions must be wrong at some level. Maybe the average galaxy has only 40 billion stars (faint surveys do detect many small, ``dwarf'' galaxies). As well, maybe the number of sand grains is three times greater. (In fact my Coastal Geomorphologist suggested that the average grain diameter could be smaller than 0.5 millimetres, probably allowing us to stack a factor of 3 more!). Combine these two changes and the grains win, just! Not so fast! Any (conspired) increase in the number of sand grains is probably offset by the recent discovery of many more galaxies by HST in the near-infrared region of the electromagnetic spectrum, not previously detected in optical surveys. Observing in the infrared minimizes the absorbing effects of dust allowing us to see galaxies enshrouded in large amounts of dust present because of vigorous star formation. The odds are that there are many more than 130 billion galaxies in the universe. I'll cast my final vote in favour of the stars, and I'll admit a slight astronomical bias (see author notes). I returned home after three days of travelling. I could now stand on a beach and not hear Carl Sagans voice. I had even warmed to the number billion. For example, whilst I was away during those three days, our Galaxy had moved another 0.2 billion kilometres towards the Virgo cluster of galaxies (located 650 billion billion kilometres away), and the population of New Zealand had experienced 1,600 billion heartbeats. Now, is that resting heartbeat? Here we go again. Carl Sagan (1934-1996) was Director of the Laboratory for Planetary Studies and David Duncan Professor of Astronomy and Space Sciences at Cornell University. Professor Sagan was a leading popularizer of science and astronomy in particular, and presented the Cosmos television series and wrote the book (Cosmos, Random House: New York) based on the series. Glen Mackie is Lecturer, in the Centre for Astrophysics and Supercomputing, Swinburne University of Technology, Melbourne, Australia.

24. WEEK 3 Grains of sand Talk to the children about their week and pray about any concerns. This term our program is called Abundance and we will thinking about the vast numbers of birds, fish, animals, stars, grains of sand which God has createdWe will see that God is the God of every scale from the tiny to the immense.We will see that God gives an abundance of blessings to us. Some are for everybody and some are particularly for a certain person We will be raising our awareness of God’s provisions and counting our blessings (if we can!) and will be amazed what the Lord has done!Show videos about Grains of Sand Read Psalm 8:3-4Read Footprints in the Sand Discuss Create a Footprints poster to take home Get into a circle and pray for the coming week.

25.  17 How precious to me are your thoughts, O God! How vast is the sum of them!  18 Were I to count them,  they would outnumber the grains of sand.  When I awake,   I am still with you. Psalm 139:17-18

26. One night I dreamed I was walking along the beach with the Lord. Many scenes from my life flashed across the sky. In each scene I noticed footprints in the sand. Sometimes there were two sets of footprints, other times there was one only. This bothered me because I noticed that during the low periods of my life, when I was suffering from anguish, sorrow or defeat, I could see only one set of footprints, so I said to the Lord, “You promised me Lord,that if I followed you, you would walk with me always. But I have noticed that during the most trying periods of my life there has only been one set of footprints in the sand.Why, when I needed you most, have you not been there for me?” The Lord replied, “The years when you have seen only one set of footprints, my child, is when I carried you.” Mary Stevenson, 1936

29. VIDEO CLIP http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M2_eKX9iVME

30. WEEK 4 Birds of the Air Talk to the children about their week and pray about any concerns. This term our program is called Abundance and we will thinking about the vast numbers of birds, fish, animals, stars, grains of sand which God has createdWe will see that God is the God of every scale from the tiny to the immense.We will see that God gives an abundance of blessings to us. Some are for everybody and some are particularly for a certain person We will be raising our awareness of God’s provisions and counting our blessings (if we can!) and will be amazed what the Lord has done!Show video Starlings on Ottmoor 5:29http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XH-groCeKbE&feature=fvw Read Genesis 1:20-23 Read Psalm 8:3-4 Discuss Work on the worksheets Get into a circle and pray for the coming week.

31. 20 And God said, "Let the water teem with living creatures, and let birds fly above the earth across the expanse of the sky." 21 So God created the great creatures of the sea and every living and moving thing with which the water teems, according to their kinds, and every winged bird according to its kind. And God saw that it was good. 22 God blessed them and said, "Be fruitful and increase in number and fill the water in the seas, and let the birds increase on the earth." 23 And there was evening, and there was morning—the fifth day. GENESIS 1:20-23

32. 6 Thou madest him to have dominion over the works of thy hands; thou hast put all things under his feet:  7 All sheep and oxen, yea, and the beasts of the field;  8 The fowl of the air, and the fish of the sea, and whatsoever passeth through the paths of the seas.  9 O LORD our Lord, how excellent is thy name in all the earth! PSALM 8:6-9

36. WEEK 5 Fields of Wild flowers Talk to the children about their week and pray about any concerns. This term our program is called Abundance and we will thinking about the vast numbers of birds, fish, animals, stars, grains of sand which God has createdWe will see that God is the God of every scale from the tiny to the immense.We will see that God gives an abundance of blessings to us. Some are for everybody and some are particularly for a certain person We will be raising our awareness of God’s provisions and counting our blessings (if we can!) and will be amazed what the Lord has done!Show videos about Wildflowers Read Genesis 1:11-13 and 2 Chronicles 7:14 Discuss Sometimes the desert blooms after rain and becomes a field of wildflowers. We can also receive this abundant refreshment when we humble ourselves, seek God pray and ask forgiveness of our sins. Work on the worksheets Get into a circle and pray for the coming week.

37. 11 Then God said, "Let the land produce vegetation: seed-bearing plants and trees on the land that bear fruit with seed in it, according to their various kinds." And it was so. 12 The land produced vegetation: plants bearing seed according to their kinds and trees bearing fruit with seed in it according to their kinds. And God saw that it was good. 13 And there was evening, and there was morning—the third day. GENESIS 1:11-13

38. If My people who are called by My name will humble themselves, and pray and seek My face, and turn from their wicked ways, then I will hear from heaven, and will forgive their sin and healtheirland.2 Chronicles 7:14

39. Videos • Australian wildflowers • http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MVEoXsW28zk&feature=PlayList&p=9616477FB585C257&index=24&playnext=2&playnext_from=PL 4:00 • Wildflowershttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DwBeuC2QC6Q&feature=related 3:00 Wildflowers in Hiroshima • http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rusw1sfUzds&feature=related 6:09

44. WEEK 6 Wildlife herds Talk to the children about their week and pray about any concerns. This term our program is called Abundance and we will thinking about the vast numbers of birds, fish, animals, stars, grains of sand which God has createdWe will see that God is the God of every scale from the tiny to the immense.We will see that God gives an abundance of blessings to us. Some are for everybody and some are particularly for a certain person We will be raising our awareness of God’s provisions and counting our blessings (if we can!) and will be amazed what the Lord has done! Show videos about herds on African plainshttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z9f5f4tIHak Read Genesis 1:24-25 and Psalm 24:1 Discuss Work on the worksheets Get into a circle and pray for the coming week.

45. 24 And God said, "Let the land produce living creatures according to their kinds: livestock, creatures that move along the ground, and wild animals, each according to its kind." And it was so. 25 God made the wild animals according to their kinds, the livestock according to their kinds, and all the creatures that move along the ground according to their kinds. And God saw that it was good. GENESIS 1:24-25

46. The earth is the Lord’s and all its fullness Psalm 24:1

50. WEEK 7 Oceans teeming with life Talk to the children about their week and pray about any concerns. This term our program is called Abundance and we will thinking about the vast numbers of birds, fish, animals, stars, grains of sand which God has createdWe will see that God is the God of every scale from the tiny to the immense.We will see that God gives an abundance of blessings to us. Some are for everybody and some are particularly for a certain person We will be raising our awareness of God’s provisions and counting our blessings (if we can!) and will be amazed what the Lord has done! Show videos about life in the oceansRead Genesis 1:20-23 Discuss Work on the worksheets Get into a circle and pray for the coming week.