Price
£7.50
Who is it for
Families
It’s designed for families to use at home to explore faith and Bible stories, using a mixture of activities, centred around a sticker-based activity. I guess you could use it in a children’s club if numbers were low, or even use it as a basis for small group work in a larger setting and just have a book per group.
A Godventure through the life of Jesus feels like a hybrid of Godly Play, Fuzzy Felts (you remember them) and the activity sticker books that children are regularly bought these days full of Disney princesses or Avengers. That might not make you want to buy it, but trust me, it’s good.
Each two-page spread is based around one of 12 stories from Jesus’ life, alongside creative ideas to share the Bible story, prayer activities, ideas for under-5s and extras for older children and adults. However, the centre piece is a picture that they can add their stickers to with a set allocated for each session. We did the first story which was Jesus calling the fishermen and we enjoyed reading the story and then using the stickers to make our own version of it. But crucially, it’s actually non-specific enough that it isn’t just a construction job and you do get to talk and think about what you’re making.
The page already had a background and we could stick the details on it. This led to very natural and interesting conversations about which of the people we thought each of the stickers were and where we might put them to depict each part of the story. It was a shame that they couldn’t then be moved because it would have been nice to be able to move them to try other places and other parts of the story. This section was hugely successful and we had some really interesting conversations about why the disciples followed Jesus and what they looked like, but the other parts were less successful. It was as if once the stickers were done the children felt that they had finished and would rather work on another story than finish the page’s non-sticker based activities. I suppose that is inevitable and as this is designed for the kitchen table and not the classroom, this is not a huge issue. I felt that the chat around the story was really good and we didn’t really need to push them to do more. Not all the pages were as good as this one, as others were more educational with less space to think, so I might only choose the storybased ones. I’m not sure how the feeding of the 5,000 page will go as we stuck all the fish for that story on this picture with our fishermen so Jesus is going to have even less to work with than usual!
The main strength of this resource is that it creates space for the children to think about Jesus, by playing with the story. That was excellent; the activity didn’t try and teach us about the story or simply reinforce some facts, so there was real freedom to explore. This led to some interesting and very natural conversations about it. The weakness would that in other activities got skipped because they just weren’t as much fun. The book cost £7.50 which strikes me as a bit of a bargain. Finding ways as a family to talk about faith is harder than you’d think and so this is a bit of a find, as it was fun for the kids and the conversation flowed naturally.
Main strength
The resource creates space for children to think about Jesus
Main weakness
The other, non-sticker-based, activites
The verdict
4 and ½ out of 5
