Teaching Jesus

Basically, since I started teaching Bible class, I have stayed pretty close to the second grade class. It's what I call my "heart" age. I love that they're still young enough to have imagination and have fun, but old enough to be able to write words and cut a mostly straight line. And in all the places I've lived, second graders learn the Old Testament. In some places, I've covered everything from Genesis to Esther/Ezra/Nehemiah. In others, I only make it through part. But either way, I haven't had a whole lot of experience with teaching Jesus.
So, when the congregation where we are now decided to change curriculums this year, I expected it would simply be a slightly different layout of the Old Testament. Well ...
I was wrong.
And this quarter, I'm teaching Jesus.
Needless to say, I had to come up with some visual aides and some craft ideas quickly. Not to mention some other ideas.

If you look at the above picture, it's a map I found of the land of Israel during Jesus's time on earth. It's not perfect, but I love being able to look and point out where things happened. I had a map of the judges' time back when I taught them. 
We also have the apostles written on the board. You can't talk about Jesus without talking about the 12 men who ran around with him. So, some of our memory work this quarter is learning their names.
Below, I have a picture of the giant name I cut out of construction paper. Each lesson, we come up with a word that describes something we learned about who Jesus is in that story. Things like:

• Son of God
• Healer
• Lord of the Sabbath
• Story-teller (we were talking about a parable)
• Shepherd
• Etc

The kids love helping me come up with ideas of what to write on there. I also have another bulletin board with little posters that define words like "Sabbath," Parable," and other words we come across and need to figure out.
Something else I'm doing is have the kids listen during the worship service for a song about Jesus. If they can tell me the title the next week, they get a small goodie, like a piece of candy or something. Same thing for our weekly memory verse.
And, I also have this poster on the wall, so we can sort of get an idea of when things happened. It's an illustrated timeline of His life. I found it on Pinterest.
These are just ideas to help us learn more about the man himself. I may do a few posts on what we're doing for certain of the stories as we go on, but I wanted to share these ideas in case there's someone else out there needing to figure out how to each something she's never taught before.
What about you? Got any tips or suggestions to add for me? Have you ever taught Jesus to a bunch of 2nd and 3rd graders?