4.10. Miracle: Jesus feeds the 5,000

This continues our series learning about Jesus. This is week 9 in the fourth quarter of a year of Preschool Bible Study that I assist with on Wednesday evening.

Jesus took a boat to a deserted place to be by Himself. But the crowds of people heard about it, and they followed Him on foot from the cities. Jesus has been teaching a couple years, so people want to see Him. Luke tells us there were about 5000 men, plus the woman and children.

When Jesus went out, He saw the crowds and felt sorry for them. He went to them and healed the sick.

Later in the afternoon, the disciples came to Jesus and told Him that they were in a deserted place, and it was late. The disciples wanted to send the people away so that they could go to the nearby villages and buy food.

But Jesus told the disciples that they didn’t need to send the people away, just give them something to eat. They asked Jesus if they should go buy bread.

They told Jesus that there were only 5 loaves of Barley bread and 2 fish. It was enough for the boy that gave the food to the Disciples, but not enough to feed the crowd.

Jesus told the disciples “Bring the bread and fish to Me.” 

Jesus told the crowd to sit on the grass in groups. They sat down in groups of hundreds and fifties. Jesus took the 5 loaves of bread and the 2 fish and He looked up into heaven, and praying to God, He gave thanks for the food and broke it.

This is a great example of praying and thanking God for our food before we eat. Then Jesus handed it out to the people. He did the same with the fish.

When everyone had enough to eat, Jesus told the disciples to collect the extra food because they didn’t want to waste anything. After the disciples collected all the food, there were 12 baskets left over!

 Many more people believed in Jesus after seeing this miracle.
 

Scripture references are found in Matthew 14:13-23; Mark 6:35-44; Luke 9:12-17; John 6:4-13.

Note on the food: The bread in Jesus’ time is not like ours. They are small, round, about 4 inches, and about ½ inch thick. They were poor people's bread, but still good food. The fish was probably to put on the bread, like sardines or tuna. (From John’s account and the way, he worded the fish)

Since I use small wicker baskets with the fish and bread, I created this flip book with a short overview of the lesson. It is one page and easy to assemble. I put the flip books together for preschool, but depending on your student's cutting ability, if they can cut, they can put these together. The color and black & white are included. Click here to download.

Kids this age just love paper plate projects, so this is quick and easy. These can be glued to the paper plate, or if you find baskets or something similar, these can just be put inside. Click here to download.

Click here to download the lesson.

 

These visuals are updated as shown above.
Click here to download the visuals.
All visuals are not shown.

Click here to download the pictures to color.
(These are the same as the visuals but are black & white.)

  

Click here to see the lesson & printables for early elementary ages.
Both of these have the lesson and printables. The second one shown has the basket in the picture to print. Click here to see it.