Godly Play: Ascension Day 2011

I first saw this idea on Oriental Trading Company where they sell it as a craft for children to make. I've prepared this as a Godly Play prop for telling the story of Jesus' ascension.

This is so quick and basic to make:

Print and cut out one of the many free colouring pictures of Jesus ascending to heaven. (I reduced the size of mine to fit the opening of the paper cup, and glued it onto a piece of card to make it a little sturdier)

Glue some cotton wool to a blue paper cup (you can also cut out white clouds from craft foam).

Make a little hole just above Jesus' head and thread a piece of embroidery floss through it, then through a small slit in the bottom of the paper cup, and sandwich it between two white cardboard clouds.

Write an appropriate Scripture on the cloud - I used Matthew 28:20:

I will set this up as follows: Make a 'mountain' by turning a mixing bowl / shoe box / laundry basket upside down and covering it with a green cloth / sheet /towel. Place peg doll disciples in a semi-circle on the mountain. Position Jesus among them and as you tell the story of how Jesus was taken up in the cloud, pull the cloud so Jesus disappears into the paper cup 'sky'.

(This is not a great photo, but it was a little tricky holding onto the cup and trying to take a photo!!)

We will end this with singing two songs my children know about Jesus returning for us one day (For my local readers: Hy kom weer op die wolke - Oom Karolus en Lente; As Jesus kom op die wolke - Jan de Wet en die Loflaaities.) I also have the full-size colouring page ready which I used for our Jesus figure. You can get it here.

He's Alive...in the hearts of children, too!

    What a blessed, blessed Holy Week I shared with our children! The Passover Seder Meal and the joy of Resurrection Sunday left me with stirring memories I will treasure in my heart forever...

Here are a glimpse of some more things we did:


On Palm Sunday we did a very simple Godly Play version of Jesus' entry into Jerusalem. This was part of our evening devotion and afterwards the children placed the palm 'leaves' on the first block of our Pathway to the Cross, and we lit the first candle.

 They loved making the Resurrection garden!

It looked lovely!

 On Good Friday evening we read the story of Jesus' burial and wrapped a plain peg doll in white 'grave clothes'...

and placed him in the tomb.

I tried to keep things really quiet and solemn on Saturday and we read the story of Jesus' death and burial several times during the day from different children's Bibles. We didn't play any secular music that day. Instead I played beautiful old hymns with the cross as a theme. My mother blessed me with a CD with the Afrikaans versions of many of the old hymns last year, and we listened to many songs in both our home languages. Songs like The Old Rugged Cross, When I survey the Wondrous Cross, Jesus Keep me Near the Cross...

And then...that beautiful Resurrection Morning broke and we hurried to the 'grave'... to find the stone rolled  away and only the grave clothes neatly folded inside! We were so happy at the news that Jesus had risen , that we 'planted' beautiful white roses in our Resurrection garden and lit all the candles on our Pathway, with a beautiful, big one on the last, white square!! 

I had made the children some new praise banners as a gift for that morning (they love wielding the banners during worship at church, but those are often too big, so I made these ones just the perfect size for my littlies!) We downloaded a version of Tim Hughes' Oh Happy Day and joyfully celebrated by dancing and waving our banners all around the living room!

No use just keeping the Good News all to ourselves, now is it? So...we supported a wonderful local initiative that offered an alternative to bunnies and eggs. Leonardo is a chocolate lamb which comes packaged in a box with a piece of Scripture. (Leonardo now also has his own website with stories and more - please click here to visit) 

We wrapped the chocolates up in a lively green and delivered them to two of our neighbours who are non-believers, and some more to widowed friends of ours.

  I was really touched by the way my children responded to the message of Holy Week. Little ArrowBoy is still a little young to really comprehend much, but even so he approached our devotions with a sweet solemnity and quietly listened to every story while the candle light played across his darling little face. Sweetpea on the other hand, drank it all in and peppered me with questions all week long. Colouring pages about palm Sunday, the Last Supper, the empty grave, and Jesus appearing to His disciples were excellent springboards for wonderful discussions. I am confident that she now has a good understanding of the sequence of events, and with the grace and love of Father God I will continue leading her toward a deeper heart-experience of Jesus' love, too. 

Godly Play: The Good Shepherd

   As part of our Play and Learn morning routine, we start the day off with a Bible story. As soon as the house is in order and everyone is dressed and ready, I ask Sweetpea to fetch the Bible Blankie (a small quilt I made for her when she was a baby. We take this to church on Sundays and they are expected to sit quietly on it...yea, well...) When ArrowBoy hears the words 'Bible Blankie' he plonks himself down just where he is!

  To help make the stories more visual and concrete, I follow some of the principles of Godly Play. This is a Montessori-inspired approach that I first read about on Deb Chitwood's blog, Living Montessori Now. At Deb's suggestion I bought the book Young Children and Worship  by Jerome S. Berryman and Sonja Stewart. It is a fantastic introduction to this approach and about half of the book consists of patterns for making your own material. I gleaned a tremendous amount from it, and then added my own style to it, since there are a few things about their approach that I find either lacking or too 'legalised'  in comparison to our family's convictions.It remains a wonderful reference and source of inspiration for our morning Bible stories, though.

  To complement our Play and Learn with Mama theme from last week, for which we looked at the book Psalm 23 as illustrated by Barry Moser (you can see what we did by clicking here), we read the story of the Good Shepherd in the mornings. For this one I followed the guidelines from Young Children and Worship, but used a wooden shepherd figure and sheep from a nativity set that I had made last year. Instead of using strips of tan felt for the sheep fold as the book suggests, we made one out of shaped craft sticks.

Here the Good Shepherd is leading his flock through the narrow and dangerous places toward the safety of the sheepfold. 

  On the first day of our week I read the story from a children's Bible and  just briefly discuss it. We then learn a new song that relates to the story (in this case it was the Afrikaans song, Die Heer is my herder [The Lord is my Shepherd]), and then repeat our memory verse for the week (Psalm 23:1).  On the second day I bring out the Godly Play materials and present the story in this way, and we again sing our new song and practice our memory verse. The same goes for the third day. On the fourth and fifth days of the week I invite Sweetpea to present the story using the materials. She is also welcome to play with the set during the rest of the day, but only in a calm, respectful way. I will give her another toy if she is just wanting to play for fun. 

Creation bean bags

      We have been doing a lot of fun activities around the Creation Story lately and to make it more concrete and visual, I made up a set of six Creation Bean Bags that we have been using in many exciting ways!

   To make the pouches, I cut strips of blue felt a little wider than our bean bags, and sewed the sides closed, leaving a little flap at the back, to which I sewed a plastic press-stud. The pictures were glued down with fabric glue and left to dry under a stack of heavy phone directories overnight.

    I used some of the heavy duty bean bags that I sell. They are made from sturdy bull denim, and filled with PVC pellets instead of real beans. This means they can be washed in a normal washing machine (a great benefit if you have children like mine who seem to learn about their world primarily through their sense of taste!!). Also, beans and lentils can get moldy - no such problem with the plastic pellets!

   So I just slip the bean bags into their felt pouches for the duration of our Creation 'theme', and can then put them away until later ( I will store them with our felt board themes - you can click here to see how I keep our felt themes together in a tidy, 'compact' way!)

Here are close-ups of the bean bags for each day:

(CANNOT. GET. PHOTOS. TO. UPLOAD. CORRECTLY. 

 I appologise for the pictures that are on their sides. I have tried and tried to get them right side up, but to no avail.)

    

    

GAME IDEAS:

1. We played a silly bean bag toss game while we listened to the song God made the Universe from our The Singing Bible CD - more about this in another post later this week.

2. Make a masking tape grid with six squares on the living room floor. Place paper plates that are numbered 1 to 6 in each square. Place the bean bags in a line at your child's feet. As you call out the number of the day, she must pick the correct square and toss the bag onto the plate in that square!

3. On the first morning that we used these, I presented them in a 'lesson' similar to the Montessori Godly Play style. Click here for a video that shows how to go about this.

*Please note: you could also make a seventh bag with nothing on it to show that God rested on the seventh day. I only had six bean bags, so whenever we spoke about the seventh day, we would stretch out dramatically and say: "On day Seven, God rested in Heaven!" *

Come play at the Childhood 101 We Play Link Up!

I also linked this post to Se7en's Friday Link Up and

ABC and 123's Show and Tell Bloghop