The highlights for me include: drawing a picture of Jericho with a child which included people in civilian dress (one was wearing a chef’s hat) on the walls of the doomed city as the child tried to explore the troubling thought that Jericho is a town where people live and not a castle full of soldiers; two children debating whether or not one of them was right to draw God in the whale with Jonah; lovely chats with the boy who normally never talks while building a story out of wooden bricks. On the other hand we’ve got a child who has drawn a dinosaur every single week and a current trend on the play-dough table for making pizzas.
Overall it’s going well, but early on we had almost no highlights at all. On the first week not a single child did an activity that related, in as far as we could tell, in any way to the story we had looked at that day. In hindsight I suppose the children were testing the water to see if we really meant it when we said they were free to do whatever they wanted, but at the time it was pretty depressing! This of course is what it’s like trying new things: some stuff will work, other stuff won’t and some will work but only if you keep going at it through some pretty tough early stages. The next thing I want our group to try is found on the pages of this lovely magazine, in our revamped resources section. We’re going to be trying out the new section called ‘Spiritual practices for children’ (p. 38) written by Ian Adams and Carolyn Edwards. I’m really excited by it; there isn’t anything like this around right now, and the principle of giving children these spiritual tools is brilliant. However, the idea of using them on a Sunday in our group is a bit frightening. The first of the series explores how silence can be a spiritual gift for children. The idea of silence may seem like an especially big jump for your group – but why not give it a go?
You’ll also find we have new craft resources written by Mina Munns from Flame Creative, which includes open spiritual reflection to help children explore Bible stories. Again – give them a go and let us know how you get on.
I will of course let you know how my group goes too. I’d say I’m cautiously optimistic but can’t help but wonder how a couple of children in the group will react! Generally, however, they are much better at this stuff than I expect them to be. And hopefully, moving forward, we will have more great reflections - and not so many dinosaurs and pizzas. SD
This Month Sam...
…has really struggled to make good tea. On more than one occasion he has endured - and subjected others to - what can only be described as ‘milky slop’.
