Form Critical Crafting

My budget doesn't stretch to pearls

My Year 12s were looking at form criticism today, and the idea that the gospels are selections and arrangements of pre-existing chunks of oral tradition. I thought it might be fun to test their understanding with a spot of crafting inspired by Schmidt's "pearls on a string" analogy and my junior school "making stuff out of dry pasta" days. 

The students examined two chapters from Matthew's gospel and turned their analysis of the different gospel forms they found into a pasta necklace, with each colour representing a different form. In the necklace in the photo, the six red pieces are parables, the green piece is a pronouncement story, yellow is a "tale", and the brown pieces are miracle stories.

Next year I might tinker with the activity, not least by using dyed pasta rather hastily-coloured-in-with-markers pasta, but overall I think the results are quite pretty!