Godly Play: The Mystery of Easter

I had the pleasure of telling this story twice this week: once to the adults at our prayer time and once at our Familienbrunch (Family Brunch) with the children and their parents. Though it may seem like we are getting ahead of ourselves with Lent, we are discussing it early since most of the meetings in our church plant are bi-weekly and we won't meet again until after Ash Wednesday. And once again, Godly Play proved to be just as thought-provoking for the adults as for the children. 

The beautiful story emphasizes the need to prepare for the joy of Easter by taking the time to ponder our own shortcomings and the price that Jesus paid to reconcile us to the Father.  It acknowledges the difficult questions surrounding the death and resurrection of Jesus.  It also speaks of the sustaining joy that can come from experiencing a period of mourning followed by a period of great happiness.  This contrast is part of the ebb and flow of walking with God, and understanding this is crucial to our spiritual journey in this life. My favorite part of the story is when I turn the purple bag containing the puzzle pieces inside out to reveal a pure white lining.  Jesus changes us from the inside out.  

Below the children are putting the puzzle pieces together to reveal a purple cross. Interestingly enough, they put it together facing me instead of themselves, so I had to turn it around.  Also, I had to laugh when one of the parents mentioned that the center piece looks like a bat, which, of course, it does!

For the creative phase this week, I chose to have the children do a directed project.  We made the prayer pots from my previous post on Lent with a few minor adjustments. This art project is great way for families to pray together during Lent and help children with ideas of what to pray for. We used natural clay that is already prepared.  (Regular clay is difficult in my setting, because of the time factor required to soften it, and little hands get very frustrated if it is too hard.) Taking a cue from the Naturkinder, I collected wood from trimmed hedges in a park to use as decorations for the pots.  I also added wooden beads, but in retrospect, this was not a good idea.  If I hadn't used the beads, the children would have been keen to use more of the wood. 

Wood, beads and clay.

Below are the objects I used for our prayer pots:

 - a red heart to remind us of God's love for us

 - a bean to remind us that we grow in our relationship to Him

 - an almond to remind us that God is patient with us and that we should be patient with others.

 - a piece of bread to remind us to share with others

 - a band-aid to remind us to help those who are sad or hurt

 - a piece of purple felt to remind us that Jesus is our king

 - a stone to remind us of the empty tomb and that Jesus is with us

I changed some of the objects from the original idea for both aesthetic and linguistic reasons.  I prefer to use natural or organic objects whenever possible.  Also, the idea of using a rubber band to remind us that God stretches his patience with us doesn't work in German, because patience can't be stretched.: )  

 

At the end, the children packed their objects and the instructions in a small bag.  If anyone is interested in  my German translation of the instructions (what to place in the pot on each Sunday of Lent and what to pray), please e-mail me and I will be happy to share.

Making the pots:

 

Some of the finished projects:

Have a great week!

Epiphany

Last Sunday we celebrated Ephiphany with the children in our church plant.  (The official feast day is on January 6 in Germany, but we didn’t have services on this day.)  The children have, of course, heard the story of the Three Wise Men many times during Advent. The Godly Play story for Epiphany stresses that Jesus was a king like no other and allows the children to ponder the meanings of the gifts. Although gold was a fitting gift for a king, frankincense and myrrh were unusual gifts because Jesus was an unusual king. 

I also added some “wondering questions” for the children at the end to help them explore the Three Kings’ spiritual journey and revelation.  How do you think the Three Wise Men felt when they finally reached the stable where Baby Jesus lay?  Do you think they found what they had expected to find?  Which of the three gifts do you like the best and why?

For the creative phase, the children could either choose to pick out their own art materials and work freely or they could work on an “angeleitet” (instructional) art project.  Below is the project that I presented.  It is a simple piece that came to me when I was out jogging and ran past an art gallery in our neighborhood with negative space paintings.  I chose the star as a symbol of God’s revelation that often comes after a long spiritual journey.  I left it white as a metaphor for revelation being an empty or blank place in us that God fills. 

 

A 3-year-old working on her project.

To paint this project:

1. Give the children a star pattern to trace or allow them to draw their own in the center of the page. 
2. Using a ruler, have them draw straight lines wherever they choose from the outside of the star to the edge of the paper, dividing the paper into quadrants.
3. Ask the children to choose 2 “cool” colors and 2 “warm” colors (after explaining what this means) and paint the quadrants.
4. The children may then fill the quadrants however they choose either with designs or pictures.

This is from a child who chose to work freely.

A normal Godly Play worship service does not usually include Montessori motor skill exercises, but because we have 3 and 4-year-olds in our services, I like to include some to help them further think about what they have heard and to help them in a practical way. Because the Godly Play story deals with the gifts that the Wise Men brought, I had the children practice wrapping gifts. I had planned to do this before Christmas, but couldn’t come up with enough small boxes to do it.  Then I saw on Leptir that Nataša had used wooden blocks and I thought this was an excellent idea! 

The tray with the materials. 

 

Maybe these ideas will help someone next year!

Advent Club - Week 4

I’ve had the wonderful opportunity this December to co-lead an Advent Club at a local elementary school.  The theme of this year’s club is “Die Hoffnung von Weihnachten: an unsere Mitmenschen denken” (The Hope of Christmas: Thinking of Others). We have been discussing with our 1-3 graders what hope is, how we can find it in the biblical narrative of the Christmas story,  and then experimenting with how to pass it on to other people once we have it ourselves.  

As usual, we began with a Godly Play story.  If you will recall, in the first week, I told the children the entire Christmas story, emphasizing that just as God chose to send hope into the world through a small, helpless baby, hope often comes in unexpected forms.  In week two I told the story of the Good Samaritan and we stressed that giving hope to others often costs us something.  This week we wanted to get the point across that hope and learning to give hope to others is a process and usually starts with small steps. So this week I chose to tell two Godly Play stories that illustrate this beautifully, the Parable of the Mustard Seed and the Parable of the Leaven (Yeast). 

A Baby that grew up to change the world, a tiny seed that became a large tree, a little yeast that caused the entire dough to rise . . .   “Oh, I get it,” said one of the boys, “From little things come big things.”  Exactly.  I lit the Christ Candle again and reminded the children that if I blew out the flame, the physical light would be gone.  But the hope of Christmas, the hope that God will make the world a better place through His children,  is a light that does not have to go out.  We can carry this light in our hearts the whole year whereever we go.  And even though the children are small, they have an important role to play in this world. 

Here is a picture of my colleague and the children thinking over the two parables and how they relate to the Christmas story:

After the story, we planned our final project, which would be taking place the next morning.  We would be receiving a visit from a preschool in another part of Berlin and would be putting on a party for them at our school.  (This particular preschool caters to the needs of children with cardiac problems, although we did not tell our children this.) 

Because the group that we visited last week, Die Arche, had given us gift bags at the end of our visit to them, we got the idea to make gift bags for the preschoolers.  

Here are some pictures of our children filling the bags, tying the bows and painting decorative tags:

The next day, the preschoolers arrived at 10 am at our school.  Our kids got to miss some of their regular classes in order to help put on the party.  Our kids wanted to do a game room and a craft room again, very similar to what we had done at Die Arche last week.

We began the party by sitting in a circle and introducing ourselves.  The preschoolers led us in some Christmas songs, and then we ate Christmas goodies together.

The group dynamic was very different this week because the preschool children were younger than our kids. The preschoolers were far more interested in our facilities and the different toys in the rooms than in playing organized games!  Also, some of our older boys were rowdier than usual, perhaps because they were the big guys on the block this time.  The craft time went well and the older girls in our group did a great job of helping the preschoolers. 

Here you see one of the preschoolers absorbed in a new toy:

Here are some photos of our craft time. The woman in the picture is a teacher from the visiting kindergarten.

Because the preschoolers could only stay for a short time, I chose a craft that the kids could finish in a short amount of time.  It is called Stacking Trees and I found it through the Living Montessori Now website. Here is a child displaying her “matryoschka style” Christmas tree:  

When I asked our children later about how the experience had been, they answered that it had been easier to mix with the preschool children and play with them, because they were younger.  The drawback had been that the party had been too short and the preschoolers had to leave just as everyone was getting comfortable with one another. 

This party was another small step in learning how to be an agent of hope for others.  Like babies that take small steps before they can walk, our children are learning to find their balance in interacting with complete strangers.  The experiences with these children during Advent 2010 are priceless and I wouldn’t trade them for anything!  May the small seeds planted in their hearts flourish and may God use their lives to shine light into dark places. 

Parable of the Mustard Seed

This week at our Familienbrunch (Family Brunch) I shared the Parable of the Mustard Seed with the children.  Jesus told this story when asked to describe his Father’s kingdom and likens it to the smallest of all seeds that grows into a large bush-like tree.  One of the things that Godly play does well is allowing the listener to enter into the mystery of God without too much being explained away.  And GP’s treatment of the parables is excellent. Even though I have heard this parable all of my life, I discover some new aspect each time I tell it that I hadn’t thought of before.

Below is a picture of the materials that I used.  Traditional GP materials are always made of wood, but it can be quite expensive when you are first starting out to purchase all the materials.  And while I tend to be a jack-of-all-trades, carpentry is not one of the things I have experience with!  As a result, I use natural materials as often as possible, but I am not above using Playmobil figures when appropriate to the story.

The questions in the Ergründungsgespräch (The Wondering Phase) at the end are great:  What did the sower do while waiting for the mustard seed to grow?  Could one take the tree and put it back into the ground?  Was the sower happy when the birds came?  What could the tree be? What or who could the trees be?  The kids were a bit restless during this part today, so it was challenging to keep them on track. : )  However, one of the older three-year-olds was fully engaged and had some interesting answers. 

For the Creative Phase, we painted flowerpots and planted cress, an edible and fast-growing plant found in Germany.  I like to do activities in children’s church that help them explore God’s creation. Many children in the western world and in big cities are somewhat disconnected from nature, and I believe that experiencing nature is vital to children being able to explore the character of God and understand the Bible.  It is also amazing how much joy children find in getting their hands dirty with planting seeds and then being able to eat the fruits of their labor.   The inspiration for this project came from Nataša, a Montessori teacher in Croatia, whose blog, Leptir, I follow. 

One of the Montessori elements that I also value and try to implement in our children’s worship services is the idea of giving the children different options instead of having them all do the same thing at the same time.  While there is always some sort of artistic way of exploring the story, the children may also choose to play with the materials in the story. 

This week I offered another option which was a hit.  (It, too, was inspired by Nataša in Croatia!)  One classic Montessori exercise to develop fine motor skills and the ability to classify and categorize is to have the children transfer objects with a tweezer from one place to another.  Here to go along with the theme of planting, I placed dried beans in a bowl of sand and had the children fish them out with tweezers and transfer them to another bowl.  

Update 2012: Please click here to see a later post on the Parable of the Mustard Seed and here to find out about the new materials.

Joshua and the Promised Land

At our Familienbrunch (Family Brunches), we've been following the story of the Israelites from Abraham on.  I always start by bringing out the Wüstensack (Desert Sack) that you see in the middle here. 

This week I told the children the story of Joshua and the Israelites entering the Promised Land.  The story came from Young Children and Worship, a book that Godly Play founder Jerome Berryman co-authored with Dr. Sonja Stewart.

After the story, we sang some songs together and the children had an opportunity to pray together.  Then we began the "creative phase" in which the children are able to express their thoughts or emotions about what they have heard and experienced or spend time with God.  The children can either spend their time playing with the desert sack and figures from the story or they can choose to work with the art materials.

Today was a typical day in which I laid out materials in trays for the children to choose from rather than having a project that was instructional. The children could choose from oil pastels, collage material, chalk pastels and beeswax crayons. And some of the children used all of the mediums.  

Sometimes the children draw pictures directly related to what they have just heard.  Many times they draw something that they have heard several weeks before.  And other times, they draw things that they have experienced in everyday life, which is also very important.  This boy is drawing a pumpkin because he was at a pumpkin carving at our house the day before.  

What is Godly Play?

How do I summarize Godly Play?  The technical definition would be that it is a form of religious education that developed out of the teachings of Maria Montessori.  But it is much more than that.  It is storytelling at its best. It is an art form.  It is a gateway to exploring the Biblical narrative and helping others find their way within as well.  It is a language teacher that helps young children find words to describe what they experience with God. It is a way of preparing one's self to meet with the triune God.

Maria Montessori was the first woman to gain a medical degree from the University of Rome. At age 40, she stopped practicing medicine in order to devote herself entirely to the world of education and she revolutionized it.  Though a devout Catholic, she never specifically developed her ideas in the area of religious pedagogy.  Her successors eventually took on this challenge.   In the year that I was born (1971!), an episcopal priest named Jerome Berryman from Houston, Texas travelled to Bergamo, Italy to study with Montessori's direct successors.  Out of his educational experiences there, Berryman developed the concept of Godly Play and put his ideas into practice at Christ Cathedral in Houston.

Godly Play is quiet, meditative and thoroughly engaging.  A storyteller sits with children in a circle around him.  The children are asked to if they are ready to hear a story.  Then storyteller then begins to tell a Biblical story using natural materials (wood, paper, felt, sand, etc.).  He intentionally doesn't make eye contact with the children, but is completely focused on the story, so that the listeners become absorbed in what they are hearing.

After the story, the storyteller leads the children in an "Ergründungsgespräch", which literally translates as "to fathom" and "conversation".  In English, this is called "The Wondering Phase".  The storyteller asks open-ended questions beginning with phrases like "Ich frage mich . . . " (literally: I ask myself . . ., but English-speaking storytellers say, "I wonder . . .") invites the listeners to say whatever is on their minds. The questions sound a bit strange the first time you hear them, but they are designed with intention to allow the listener to identify with and put themselves within the story.  I have to admit that I was shocked the first time I heard this phase described as "The Wondering Phase" in English, because it sounded to my ears a bit too fairy tale-ish.  (I first learned about Godly Play entirely in German and it wasn't until much later that I became acquainted with any of the English terms. ) 

Afterwards comes the "Creative Phase" in which the children are invited to pick out artistic materials to express their thoughts and respond to what they have heard.  They are also allowed to play with the story they have heard or pick another story from the shelves in the room to play with, which is very important since children learn by playing.  In case you're wondering (no pun intended), a  typical Godly Play worship also has a prayer time with the children, worship in the form of singing, and a "feast", a snack that also has the idea of communion embedded within it.

Although Godly Play came from America, it has been translated into the culture here in a thoroughly German way.  There is a German non-profit made up mostly of theologians and professionals who are now writing their own original Godly Play stories instead of merely translating Berryman's stories.  They also train people (like me) to do Godly Play in churches and schools.

That's about all I can describe in one post and any Godly Play enthusiast will tell you that I left out a lot, but I hope to talk more about specific aspects in future posts.

Below is a picture of Erich playing with some of the materials. You can see Jonah, the Nativity, the Risen Christ and Mount Sinai being used as a boat with the articles of the tabernacle in them: : )  The sand is our "Wüstensack" (Desert Bag).

Creative Phase: The Tabernacle

The church plant that we are a part of offers a Family Brunch twice a month.  We brunch together and then I lead a children's worship service afterwards.  Last Sunday, I told the children the Godly Play story, "Die Bundeslade und das Zelt der Begegnung" ("The Ark of the Covenant and the Tent of Meeting").  The story was completely new to the children and even my son, who is quite knowledgeable about the Bible, was unfamiliar with the Tabernacle and its furnishings. 

Typically, after a Godly Play Story, the children choose their own art materials and express their thoughts on the story (or anything else they are thinking about!) to explore what they have heard or express worship to God.  There is a great discussion in German Godly Play circles about whether the creative phase can be "angeleitet" (instructional or not) and this same discussion is also going on in the Montessori world over how much an art lesson/project can be instructional.  (If it bugs anyone that I throw German words into my sentences, I can't do anything about it.  It just expresses who I am during this season of life.)  I happen to think that it can as long as the children have room to determine the course and outcome of their creation and I experiment with such in our worship service.

All that to say that on Sunday, we had an instructional creative phase based on the Tabernacle story.  I got the idea while doing an autumn art project from Deep Space Sparkle with my kids in which we painted leaves with white paint and made prints on black paper.

1. First I made stamps for the children using foam rubber and sponges based on the furniture in the Tabernacle (accidentally left out the bronze basin filled with water!), symbols for the Trinity, and a person.

(You might be wondering why I included the symbols for the Trinity.  I have been heavily influenced by Tim Keller's "Christocentric" method of teaching and I try to help the children see that the Old and New Testaments have a natural relationship to them rather than being separate entities that have nothing to do with one another.)

2. Next I instructed the children to think of a place where there they like to meet with God and paint this as a background of sorts.

3. Then, the children were encouraged to add the stamps, as many or as few as they saw fit, to their pictures.

The children, even the youngest (age 3), took lots of time with their pictures and the results were quite dramatic. (They especially loved the gold paint!)

 (age 7)

 (age 6)

(age 3)

(age 4)

I love my job!!