Easter Club Week 1 (OsterAG Woche 1)

Our school’s second ever Easter Club got off to a start this week! We have a great group of 12 first, second and third graders, some of whom have been in our clubs before and know what to expect, and quite a few new children.  I am also so happy to again have the teacher who helped me with the Advent Club co-leading with me again.

Die allerzweite Oster AG fing diese Woche bei unserer Schule an!  Wir haben eine tolle Gruppe von 12 Kindern in den 1.-3. Klassen.  Manche von den Kindern waren schon bei uns in einer AG und wussten was zu tun war, aber viele waren neu.  Ich bin so froh, dass unser Hortleiter wieder co-leitet mit mir.

I started off by telling the children the Godly Play story called “The Mystery of Easter”, which is great introduction to the Lenten season and explains why we have these six weeks before Easter to prepare ourselves for the celebration of Jesus’ resurrection. 

Als Einstieg in die Fastenzeit habe ich den Kindern eine Geschichte von Godly Play namens “Das Geheimnis von Ostern” erzählt.  Die Geschichte hilft den Kindern zu verstehen, warum die Kirche sechs Wochen vor Ostern hat um uns auf das Osterfest vorzubereiten. 

Here are six puzzle pieces.  They are purple representing the King who comes, and goes, and comes again.  The purple also represents the sadness and earnestness that happens on Good Friday.  And six weeks of preparation that are all unique.

Hier sind sechs Puzzleteile.  Sie sind purpurfarben und stellen den König dar, der kommt, und weggeht und wieder kommt.  Sie stellen auch den Trauer und Ernst von Karfreitag dar. Und die sechs verschiedene Wochen, die unikat sind. 

What happens when we bring them all together?  A cross that fills us with sadness and many questions.

Was wird daraus, wenn alle Bestandteile zusammen kommen?  Ein Kreuz, das traurig ist und steckt voller Fragen.

But wait . . .  there is also a beautiful side to Easter.  Out of the sadness comes beauty and pure joy.  Jesus is not gone, but with still us in his own special way. 

Aber warte . . . es gibt auch eine wunderschöne Seite zu Ostern.  Von der Vorbereitungszeit kommt das pure Fest.  Jesus ist immer noch bei uns auf seine besondere Weise.

In Easter Club as well as Advent Club, we have a more structured creative phase. We asked the students to divide themselves into 4 groups.  Each week a different group will begin an art project based on the story they have just heard.  Each group gets an 80 x 80 cm canvas and materials to do a mixed media collage.  We discuss the story together and decide how we will fill the space.  Besides reflecting on the story and the meaning of Easter, our educational goals with this art project are to learn how to work together as a team and communicate our ideas to one another. 

Nach der Geschichte haben die Kinder eine Kreativphase, wobei sie sich weiter Gedanken über die Geschichte machen können.  In der Oster AG ist diese Zeit angeleitet.  Wir haben die Schüler gebeten sich in 4 Gruppen aufzuteilen.  Jede Gruppe bekommt einen Leinwand in der Größe 80 x 80 cm und Collage Material.  Wir reflektieren zusammen üner die Geschichte und entscheiden, wie wir den Leinwand gestalten werden.  Zusätzlich zum Reflektieren über die Geschichte sind die pädagogischen Ziele des Kunstprojekts Teamarbeit, Kreativität und Kommunikation zu fördern. 

This week, unfortunately, the canvases that we ordered had not yet been delivered, so we had to improvise!  The three students that I worked with made a sketch of what they ultimately wanted to do and cut out some of their collage material.  Next week, they get to start painting and glueing.: )

Leider waren die bestellten Leinwände noch nicht angeliefert!  The 3 Schüler, die dran waren, haben eine Vorskizze von ihren Ideen gemacht und fingen an ihr Material zur Collage auszuschneiden.  Nächste Woche können sie mit Malen und Kleben anfangen.


And what did the other students do?  Well, I am all about getting students out into nature to enjoy God’s amazing creation. Fortunately, we have a lovely park near our school, so the other teacher took them on a field trip to gather nature materials to incorporate into our future art projects.  Since it is only the beginning of spring here and is still quite cold, I was curious to see what the children brought back.  I was pleased and surprised when they returned with large, gorgeous pieces of bark.  I hadn’t expected their finds to be so big! I had thought that we would use them as collage pieces on the canvases, but instead I’ll just go with their flow and think of some other ways that we can make art out of them.

Und was haben die anderen Kinder gemacht?  Ich bin immer dafür Kinder ‘raus aus dem Klassenzimmer in die Natur zu begleiten. Zum Glück haben wir einen großen Park in der Nähe von der Schule.  Mein Kollege nahm die anderen Kindern dorthin um Naturmaterial für die anderen Kunstprojekten zu sammeln, Da es hier nur der Anfang vom Frühling ist, warich echt neugierig zu sehen, was die Kinder finden würden.  Ich war überrascht als sie ganz große Stücke von schönen Baumrinde zurückgebrahct haben.  Ich hatte mir kleinere Teile, die zur Collage geeignet sind, vorgestellt. Aber ich werde mit Freude ihrem Impuls folgen und etwas mit ihnen ausdenken.: )  Das schätze ich sehr an Kunst mit Kindern: es entwickelt sich organisch und überraschend.

Gathering treasures in the park.

Beim Sammeln im Park.

We ended out time together by admiring our nature treasures and a having a small snack.

Wir haben am Ende unsere Naturschätze bewundert und einen kleinen Snack genossen.

It was a great start and I’m looking forward to next week! 

Es war ein toller Anfang und ich freue mich auf nächste Woche!

See the rest of our Easter Club:
Week 2
Week 3
Week 4
Week 5

Godly Play Outside of the Church: Part 1

When I first read Jerome Berryman’s introduction to Godly Play  (Godly Play: Einführung in die Theorie und Praxis), I was particularly intrigued by a chapter in which he described using Godly Play outside of the walls of the church. Among the places that Berryman experimented was in hospitals with children, teenagers and patients with eating disorders.  Because our church plant was at that time (and still is) in the beginning stages, being a children’s pastor was/is not a full-time job for me.  So I began to think about how I could also use Godly Play in public places.

Two opportunities immediately presented themselves and I will describe the first one in this post.  My son attends a public school in our neighborhood that is heavily dependent on parental involvement, because it has only been been open for three years.  We parents help with all sorts of things from organizational duties to offering after-school activities. In Berlin, religion is an elective offered in school from the first grade on.  I developed a friendship with our religion teacher and we began to think about what we could offer children who were not able to attend religion class on a regular basis, but nevertheless were curious about the Christian faith.   Since Easter was coming up, the religion teacher suggested that I offer an after-school activity called “Why we Celebrate Easter” in the 4 weeks leading up to Easter.  Our principal gave us permission and I started to work.

It was a challenging, but wonderful experience.  Eighteen children signed up.  Because they were unfamiliar with the quiet, meditative nature of Godly Play, it was challenging to get them all to listen the first week.  Also, the school was too short on child-care workers to loan me a staff member to help.  One should probably never try to do Godly Play with 18 children alone, but sometime you gotta do, what you gotta do . . . Slowly, they grew accustomed to it and most of the children found that they needed this quiet time in their week.  (There was much sadness when the club came to an end and the children would ask me for weeks later when Easter club was going to start again!)

For our creative phase, we built an Easter Garden together.  The children and I developed ideas together of sculptures we could add each week as a response to the stories.  The garden was displayed in the school cafeteria and I learned from the teachers that many children would gather around it each day looking to see what we had added. 

Here are a couple of photos of me telling the stories to the children:

After the story, we worked on our sculptures for the garden:

It was fascinating to observe the children's ideas. These two girls ended up painting the crosses a bright yellow, something that I would not have thought of and which made the piece beautiful.

And the garden:

The angels proclaiming Jesus's resurrection are adorable!

This was created after the story of the Jesus as the Good Shepherd. I love how the sheep have such big smiles!

I am about to begin an Advent Club in two weeks, so I will keep you posted on how it goes and what we do this time!