Other Godly Play and Catechesis Resources on the Web

Since I stepped into the blogging world last October, I have been amazed at how much I have learned from and been inspired by other bloggers! My practice of Godly Play has developed and grown as a result of the feedback and encouragement from others in this field.  I want to take this opportunity to call your attention to some other wonderful blogs about Montessori-based religious education that I have come to love. If you are interested in learning more about Godly Play or Catechesis of the Good Shepherd, by all means check out these blogs!

Godly Play:
Wonderful in an Easter Kind of Way - Storyteller uses GP in Junior Church at an Anglican church in Finland.
Gott im Spiel - Godly Play - Markus is a colleague here in Germany who leads GP in a Roman Catholic setting.
Godly Play Spain - David Pritchard writes about the development of GP in Spain.
Living Montessori Now - Deb Chitwood is trained in both GP and Catechesis and writes about her experience as well as providing links to on-line resources.
Watkins Every Flavor Bean -  Emily lives in Scotland and uses Godly Play with her own children.
All Play on Sunday - This blogger also has lots of ideas for Godly Play as well as sensorimotor worship for children.
Browniesmoke - Jill in North Carolina, USA, also has some interesting posts on her GP experiences.

Catechesis of the Good Shepherd:
Thoughts from the Sheepfold - Leslie is Director of Spiritual Formation at an Episcopal church in Ohio, USA.
The Diary of a Sower - Cheryl is a Catechist in a Roman Catholic church in the US.

If you know of any other blogs that I may have left out or am not yet aware of, please let me know. : )

Sketching Live Subjects

Flexibility seems to be a theme in my life lately.  On Monday, we had planned a day trip to the forest, but woke up that morning to rain and colder weather.  We quickly changed our plans and went to the Berlin Aquarium instead.  Our aquarium houses four floors of fish, reptiles, amphibians and insects.  (In other words, four stories of fun!) As I pushed the planned forest activities to the side and packed a picnic lunch for us, I decided that I would take along some drawing materials and encourage the kids to draw one of the creatures that they liked the most.

Turtles and Caimans in the tropical terrarium. 

Nothing trains the eye or the powers of concentration like drawing live subjects.  Drawing an animal helps a child to understand and consider it in a deeper way, like taking a mental snapshot. Observing and drawing moving subjects also requires the children to process the image in a more complex way than drawing a still life.

Unlike paints, drawing materials are light-weight and easy to transport and require little effort to unpack. I brought along the following:
1) small plywood boards to use as a stable surface for drawing (you can find these at a hobby shop or home improvement-type store)
2) colored pencils
3) A4-sized paper

A word about colored pencils: always buy good-quality ones or else they are no fun for children to draw with. The kind you get on airplanes or at a dollar store can take all the pleasure out of drawing, because the child has to press down hard to make a mark and cramp the fingers.

While children are usually braver about drawing live subjects than adults, they are not always excited about it. When I pulled out the art supplies during lunch, one child's immediate reaction was to say, "Boring!"  But interestingly enough, after this child drew the first picture, he was hooked and then wanted to draw three more.

I think several things helped. I sketched with the children and was engrossed in my own work, thereby helping to place value on the activity. But I let the children choose the pace and moved onto a new animal when they were ready, even if I wasn't. I also did not demand that the children "finish" the picture unless they wanted to.

Here you can see the plywood boards and
large pencil case for the colored pencils better.

Here are some of the children's sketches:

Sharks and a sting ray.

A butterfly extracting juice from an orange slice.

A moth. 

Turtles and Caimans.

After so much intense observation, the kids were ready to exert some physical energy.  Fortunately, the rain stopped and the sun came out and the kids hopped onto and into the fountain/sculpture in front of the Aquarium.

And of course, off came the shoes and we went home soaking wet.: )  A great way to spend a summery day! 

Linked to  The Magic Onions and Art 4 Little Hands and Ordinary Life Magic

The Theme of "Hide and Seek" in Godly Play

Play is an essential part of childhood. Parents begin instinctively playing "Peek-a-Boo" with infants.  Not only is this game interesting and fun for babies, but it also has an important pedagogical element.  Babies learn "permanance" in a concrete way:  that people and objects do not simply disappear just because our view is blocked. Since play is such a foundational part of childhood regardless of culture, it stands to reason that God interacts with children as well in playful experiences.  In fact, God invites us to play with him our whole lives.  It's just that as adults we forget how to play sometimes.  The ability to play with God even as adults is part of what Jesus meant when he said that we must be as children to enter the Kingdom.

One game that God plays with us our whole lives is "Hide and Seek", and by this I mean the phases in our spiritual lives where God is sometimes very present in an almost tangible way and other times when we can't seem to find any traces of him. Rebecca Nye writes in "Children's Spirituality: What it is and why it Matters" that " . . . mystery is a close, mostly unthreatening friend in childhood."  Many childhood games, including "Hide and Seek" and "Peek-a-Boo" deal with the unknown and trying to figure something out. Nye writes that children have limited knowledge and are conscious of this. Therefore, mystery is a companion and does not necessarily cause anxiety.  I see this in the way my own children interact with God.  They rarely ever wonder if God is there.  He just is and they accept this.  Sure, they do ask questions a lot as to why they can't see him, but there is no underlying worry that God is not there or will not help them. But as adults, we often seem to unlearn this and fall into the trap of worry and anxiety when faced with unknown circumstances.

This contrast of God revealing himself and hiding himself is a reoccurring theme in the Godly Play stories as well as the Biblical narrative up on which the stories are based.  One of my favorite examples is "The Great Family" in which Sarah and Abraham (and the children listening to the story) learn that God is not in this one place or another, but everywhere they go. The Advent and Lenten stories speak of waiting for God and following his cues in finding out what Christmas and Easter are all about.  Examples in the Biblical narrative include the story of Esther and the account in Acts 27 & 28 of Paul's shipwreck near Malta.  In both cases, God seemed to not be present (in Esther he is actually never mentioned!) and the worst imaginable things appear to be happening. However, in the end God reveals his active involvement in a relevatory way that has lasting positive consequences for their lives. Just as Mom isn't gone forever when she disappears into another room, God is not gone forever when we don't see direct evidence of his working at a particular phase of our lives.

In my own life, I became acquainted with Godly Play at a time when I felt abandoned by God and had all but lost faith in the church (even though I was a church-planter!).  Though I knew logically that God was there and wasn't ready to simply discard my faith, my emotions and intuition were contradicting what I knew to be true about God.  Learning to play "Hide and Seek" with God as an adult has helped me to understand his character and heart in a fresh way and to deal with the underlying fear that was paralyzing me.

All of this talk about play can lead to the question of whether or not God is being cruel by "playing" with us.  Is he? The answer depends on how we understand play.  Martin Steinhäuser and Jerome Berryman write in "Godly Play: Einführung in die Theorie und Praxis" write about the differences between "true play" and "pseudoplay".  True play is voluntary and involves skills such as creativity and problem-solving. All participants are actively engaged in the game.  Pseudoplay, on the other hand, is forced, manipulative, and robs its participants of energy.

God, because of his grace, invites us into true play. His intention is not to break us when he hides himself, but to lead us into deeper revelation and relationship that come through playing with him. When we understand this, we become active participants in the greatest game of all and are changed by it, instead of being trapped in the role of a victim. Let's learn how to play with God again and teach our children to do the same.

Quote of the Day

"What makes people smart, curious, alert, observant, competent, confident, resourceful, persistent - in the broadest and best sense, intelligent- is not having access to more and more learning places, resources, and specialists, but being able in their lives to do a wide variety of interesting things that matter, things that challenge their ingenuity, skill, and judgement, and that make an obvious difference in their lives and the lives of people around them."

-John Holt

Drawing Fairies

I haven't written about an art project in a while, so here is something my daughter and I did recently  . . . 

Fairies are just plain fun to draw.  Whether you are a five-year-old like my daughter or at the age where you stop counting the birthdays like me, they are hard to resist. So when I suggested to my daughter that we do a spontaneous drawing lesson on fairies, I didn't have to twist her arm. 

While on vacation in the Czech Republic last year, I saw this adorable book and just had to buy it.  The title translates to "Insidious Plants" and weaves a practical lesson for young children about poisonous garden plants around a story about fairies. It is an ingenious idea and I wish that we had it in English.  The illustrations are gorgeous (the illustrator, Eva Chupikova, is apparently also a fashion illustrator in Prague) and my daughter loves to look at it and often has me translate passages into English for her.   Because I love to use graphics to train the eye, this book was perfect for our lesson.

My daughter picked out a fairy in the book to use as inspiration for her drawing. Using the principles in Drawing with Children by Mona Brookes, we dissected her into the shape families. Here are the steps that we used int he picture below: 1) I had her draw a semicircle for the face. 2) Then she added two thin lines for the neck. 3) Next, she drew an egg shape for the torso. 4) Then, two large curves for the dress and long thin curves for the arms. 

The subsequent steps: 6) She made long, thin oval shapes for the wings. 7) I instructed her to make large eyes and a small mouth and nose. 8) She added a small oval and curved line for a tiara. 

Next she worked on the background adding a horizon line. I had her add whatever she wanted and she chose trees, a butterfly, a dragonfly and flowers. 

She then took a purple chalk pastel and colored the sky.

Then, my daughter did what many children do and cause their parents to freak out.  (And had I no experience with children and art, I would do the same.) She began to tell a story of a storm coming in and colored over the drawing first with gray and then a green marker.  With young children, it's about the process and experience and not the final result! She also got tired before everything was colored and quit before the butterflies were finished. Again, it's about the process and not about the final result.: )

And this is my picture that I drew just for fun:

Yep, you never get too old to draw fairies!

Linked to The Magic Onions

A Child's Way of being with God

In a post from last month, I quoted Rebecca Nye in her book "Children's Spirituality: What it is and why it Matters" defining children's spirituality as "God's ways of being with children and children's ways of being with God." This implies that these ways are often different from the ways that adults spend time with God. As parents, mentors and pastors for children, we have to be constantly observing and sensitive to these ways and make space for them.

One thing I've learned is that children spend time with God at what we adults often consider the most inopportune times.  Yesterday morning I walked my daughter to kindergarten in the pouring rain. I mean, it was raining cats and dogs. Every person in sight was looking stressed and huddled underneath their umbrella or the hood of their rainjacket.  (In central Berlin, a car is more of a hindrance than anything else, so we walk most places.) Life tends to be a musical for my daughter, and soon after leaving our house, she began singing.  I soon realized that the lyrics were a dialogue that she had recently had with another little boy in kindergarten about the existence of God.  The little boy had apparently told her that he didn't believe in God and my daughter responded by telling him her thoughts about God.  She sang his discourse and then her responses to it all the way there.  It honestly sounded a bit like a 5-year-old version of "Carmina Burana". Rather than interrupting her to ask questions, I silently listened and was amazed at the simple wisdom in what she sang about and to God.

Why my daughter picked this moment to begin singing about God in the pouring rain, I cannot say. However, I am very sure that she was processing an incident with God that had a big impact on her and she was deeply engrossed in it.  It was important to her and she need to do this.  And somehow the rain spurred it all on.  

I am glad that she trusts me enough to do this in my presence and know that I will not laugh or interrupt her. I am also glad that her enjoyment of God isn't limited to quiet, meditative places.  And I am thankful that God is opening my eyes to how he spends time with children, so that I can help make room for it.

Summer Reading

Our six weeks of summer vacation began last week and I am delighted to use the time off from teaching to catch up on some reading.

"Children's Spirituality: What it is and why it Matters" by Rebecca Nye

"Der Neugier der Kleinsten Raum Geben: Kinder fragen nach Gott und der Welt" by Ulrike Labuhn. (Ulrike is also my Godly Play trainer. I hope this one gets translated into English at some point. Heck, maybe I'll translate it! )

"Children's Ministry that Fits: Beyond One-Size fits all Approach to Nurturing Children's Spirituality" by David Csinos

I'll give some feedback on these books when I'm finished!

When I'm not reading for me, my other favorite pastime is reading to my kids.  These are the two read-alouds that we are currently reading:

"The Princess and the Goblin" by George MacDonald (I discovered MacDonald last year and love his writings.)

"Nancy Drew: The Secret of Mirror Bay" by Carolyn Keene (This book enthralled me as a kid! It's great fun to read it to my own kids now.)

What are you reading this summer?