Happy Annunciation Day

As I mentioned in my last blog post, today is Annunciation Day - when we remember the Angel Gabriel's visit to Mary and Mary's acceptance of God's call on her.

Yesterday I made a brief visit to an after-school centre run for first- and second-graders so they won't be at home alone while their parents are at work. I noticed that they seemed to have a little worship area!

It looked similar to a prayer table in a Catechesis of the Good Shepherd atrium. I was also interested because in my Church of England theological studies we just recently been learning about the requirements for "collective worship" in English schools. I asked a few questions of the child I was visiting, but in my excitement I asked too many yes/no questions and too few open-ended questions. *sigh* Still, what I've understood is that they have a little worship time almost every day. It includes a Bible story and a prayer (at least).

The current theme clearly was the Annunciation.

The whole wall above this table was covered with angels. This one was made by the boy I was visiting:

Happy New [liturgical] Year!

We visited my parents' church today. They had purple and pink Advent candles in the Sunday School / Fellowship group session, and red ones in the worship service. The "baby boomers" in the Sunday School group debated whether to light the candles in a circular pattern (which is what I had assumed was the only way), or in the shape of a cross. As you can see (because the pink candle will be third), the cross pattern was the one chosen.

As a Finnish resident, I was pleased that we happened to sing a Hosanna song. The song, "Hoosianna", is mandatory and loved for First Advent all across Finland. 

One of our PowerPoint slides reminded me of one of Sheila's art projects, 

and we even had a geography lesson!

drawing the year

In my last post, I showed some seasonal drawings I'd done with a five-year-old friend.

I wonder if anyone noticed the little circles in the upper left of each picture. Remember my presenting the lesson about the liturgical year this summer? Well, my friend certainly did! As soon as I began to explain that I wanted to make pictures for the seasons of the year, she made the association. She pulled out a red tube of glitter glue and explained that it would ideal for that one red square that is HOT.

Even after I explained that I wanted the four seasons of Spring, Summer, Winter, and Fall (rather than the liturgical seasons like Pentecost), she could not shake the memories of the Godly Play lesson. You can talk about how time is in a line and also in a circle, she offered. [This is how the Church Year lesson begins.]

Our solution was to draw the Circle of the Church Year in the corner of each seasonal picture. I suspect that this association may be why she decided to put even our large seasonal symbols in circles.

She also carefully drew churches inside the "church clocks":

She explained to me as she drew, this is the door and this is the window, but I didn't pick up on what she was doing fast enough. So the next church was extra-elaborate:

See that passage between the two doors? That's where the WCs are!

a picture of being in the circle

I drew this myself, as part of an exercise for my spiritual director. (Please ignore the torn bit, caused by taping it up and then taking it down to bring home.)

art on Lindisfarne

Sheila's recent post about Saint Columba and the Book of Kells prompted me to put together a post about my visit with Vandriver to Holy Island (or Lindisfarne) this summer. Like Mont Saint-Michel, Lindisfarne is a tidal island (meaning that you can walk or drive to it, but only at low tide). In 635 AD a monastery was founded there by Aiden, a monk from Iona.

Aiden's tile - front

Among the ruins of the Benedictine abbey (built around 1150 AD), I found several modern "tiles" on display designed by children from the island village. It seemed especially fitting that the first one I came across was by a child named Aiden!

Aiden's tile - back

Can you spot two tiles in the picture below?

(hint: the tiles are white)

Here are two more tiles, close-up:

art by Rowan

art by Caitlin

I was intrigued by this project to engage local children with historic monuments (which then also reminded tourists that this island is some people's home).

While on Lindisfarne I also did some shopping. One purchase was a book which went straight into my store of art materials for the Godly Play room: The Freehand Celtic Knot Manual, written by Mary Fleeson of the Lindisfarne Scriptorium. The book gives instructions for drawing six different types of knots and plaits. Fleeson writes, Ideally you should enjoy what you are doing, exercise your imagination and draw nearer to God through the experience.

coloring the flood

I hope my godson won't mind if I share with you a card I recently sent him. As I typed out what I'd written, I began to wish I'd drafted it first and then edited it before writing straight onto the card itself, but sometimes just sitting down and writing is the way it gets done and actually put into the post!

art by Andrew Miles, photo by me

Dear [godson],
     I am so glad that your Mama sent me a picture of something you drew in your new art journal. I hope you enjoy using it even if sometimes things don't come out the way you expect.
     I wonder what you think of this picture? I think it's interesting that the waves are not just blue but so many colors. And it's not so common to draw Noah's ark so you can't see any animals! I wonder why the artist did that. (Except the dove. And that's interesting too because it's just a shape - no color and no detail.)
     Keep experimenting with your art and draw what you feel.

Love, [Storyteller]

story images

As part of my theological training with the Church of England I was fortunate to be able to visit the Norwich Synagogue (the visit was part of our module on "World Faiths"). As beautiful and interesting as their worship space was, what really caught my eye were some pillows on benches in the lobby. The pillow covers illustrated stories from the Hebrew Scriptures (or, as we sometimes call them, the Old Testament). I had not brought a good-quality camera along, but these were so striking and beautiful that I asked a fellow student to photograph them for me so that I could share them with you.

photographed at the Norwich Synagogue

photographed at the Norwich Synagogue

Visually, I judged these images as simultaneously simple enough to catch the eye and complex enough to hold a person's interest (you can just see a tiny little fish in the corner of the Jonah pillow, for example). Being myself a person who enjoys "white privilege", I was briefly startled but also very pleased to see that the figures in these images were clearly non-white. And as a Junior Church leader, I immediately rejoiced that the pillows would provide an easy point of contact and recognition for children. Young children entering the synagogue would be drawn to these beautiful yet non-breakable objects which were placed so as to be accessible to them. And yet they were not something which adults might dismiss or de-value as being "merely" for children. Wonderful.

more on Play and Pray

As promised, somewhat belatedly, here's more on the launch of our Play and Pray area. This post will tell you what the set-up was like, including some initial reflections on what worked and what didn't.

We chose our space to gave a good vantage point for any child who wanted to see what was going on. The space felt enormous as we were moving twelve chairs to make room for it, but didn't feel so large once three children were inside it. As soon as one lay stomach-down to do some drawing I began to be thankful that more children hadn't come!

The floor was lined with a thin comforter / padded blanket. Each corner was covered with a mat (and sometimes a strategically-positioned chair leg) to help keep it in place. Spare mats were available by the "entrance", but they weren't really made use of this week.

I realized that my idea of putting all the materials around the edges was perhaps ill-conceived when I watched the smallest child labor to get past the other two to reach the colored pencils. (I praised him for carefully avoiding stepping on any artwork in doing so.) I then moved the pencils, explaining in hushed tones that it would be better to put them where everybody could reach them.

materials

• For an embarrassingly long time, I've had the materials for the Godly Play Jonah story on loan from a neighboring parish (fortunately, they had two sets). But I never put it into our classroom because I have trouble with that story. (Why? That's for another post!) But I brought it out for the Play and Pray area, along with an odd assortment of tiny stuffed animals in a basket - I couldn't find an ark at the flea market!

• Our book basket included a storybook about Jonah and the Whale in English and a book in Finnish with a huge fold-out poster of  (a cartoon painting of) Noah's ark. When a child first bored of drawing, I silently drew his attention to the correspondences between the illustrations and our 3D materials.
• Two very different sheep, both  found at the flea market for super-cheap (the cheap sheep?), stood alongside the book basket.

• The pastor was very leery of bringing clay / plasticine / play-dough to the service, feeling that then children would need to wash their hands before coming to the altar and that would just be impracticable. Similarly, I wasn't convinced we'd be able to clean glitter glue off the blanket we were using. But we did have paper and card in various sizes, colored pencils, two kinds of crayons, and some stickers left over from Easter egg decorating.

• On the chair closest to the altar I laid a green cloth (flea market place-mat), the Christ candle, and a basket of half-assembled cardboard Nativity pieces. As it turned out, nobody took any notice of this activity this week.

• Also available but not used were the flip-book guides to the liturgy (I might place at least one of these into the book basket next time).
• Because we were having baptisms that first week (a whole family was baptized), I had also brought along my own Godly Play baptism materials. But at the start of the service they were accidentally covered up. Just as the youngest's patience and attention was wearing thin and I was getting ready to bring them out... I recognized the strains of Jesus, Lamb of God and announced that it was time for communion. So we did fine without them.

When the time came for the baptisms themselves, I stood up and walked right up to the front of our space, encouraging the children to do the same. It was rather a long process, as each adult knelt to be baptized and was then robed in an alb by their godparent before the next baptism. As you can see, by the time the family father was being robed, only one child was really still interested. But when the baby was finally baptized and began to cry that got everyone's attention again.


thoughts for the future: One member of the church has already told me she owns a Noah's ark puzzle that she'd like to donate to us. Hooray!

It feels paradoxical to think that two or three children at a table will take less space than the same children coloring on the floor, but if we can figure out how to store them I'd like to consider getting a child-sized table and chairs. (Last year we tried having the children kneel in front of the pew-chairs and use them as desks, but this was disastrous because these wooden seats make extremely loud percussion instruments. A mere dab of a glue stick  reverberates around the chapel like a gun-shot.)

in the chapel

This past Sunday our usual Junior Church space was in use as a polling station for Finland's presidential election. So we met in a chapel instead, within the same building as our adult congregation was meeting (in another chapel).

Thank you, children, for making no complaints at all about the lack of story materials or the reduced choice of art materials (a small amount of plasticine - without tools or trays so it could only be manipulated within one's hands; colored pencils, crayons, and two sizes of paper).

It was not a great surprise, since Junior Church had met there two weeks earlier (during the first stage of the presidential election). On that Sunday two mothers had led the children in a tour of the chapels. They and the children had together pondered the artwork hung over this altar. My understanding is that this chapel is, at least partly, designated as a Children's Chapel, which makes me disappointed that this piece of art is hung far too high for children to see properly.

apologies for the reflections!

detail

The children were able to make out the heads of several animals peering out of the door, and concluded that it was a depiction of Noah's ark. One mother asked, "Well then what is that small white thing at the bottom?"

"A candle," was the verdict.

The mother later reported this to me, adding proudly, "I didn't tell them ..."

"... what you had assumed the picture was about," I finished for her, grinning. "Good for you!"

Remarks about scribbles

Sheila has just posted links to two very interesting guides to children's art development. While I see my own role exclusively as a Godly Play storyteller and facilitator (NOT as an art teacher), I nonetheless found several points of interest there.

Here's great advice along the lines of the kind of feedback we try to give in Godly Play anyway:

As the [under-3-year-old] child starts naming his or her scribbles, listen to the child’s comments and use the meanings offered by the child as a source for dialogue. ...If the child says, “I’m running,” ask questions like “Do you like to run on the playground?” or “Where are you running?” Encouraging the child to verbalize his or her thoughts, feelings and experiences independently shows the child that you value what he or she has done. This sort of thoughtful praise will help children to be enthusiastic and imaginative in their future art encounters. (Craig Roland)

And this is a reassurance for those who might be disappointed not to be giving pre-set crafts to our preschoolers:

At four or five, the child begins to tell stories or work out problems with her drawings, changing basic forms as needed to express meaning. Often once the problem is expressed, the child feels better able to cope with it. (Susan K. Donley, citing Betty Edwards)

For these quotes in context, and much more, click through to Explore and Express: Art & Child Development: Two Great Resources.

Advent art - initial reflections

As "stf" has commented, it is worth my reflecting upon what is behind my unwillingness to let go of control over the finished product of my Advent art (presented over the past several blog posts). But I do think that a big part of it was simply that I was trying to do too many things with that one project. I wanted to give the children something to do if they got bored or antsy during the sermon at church, but I wanted that to be more than "busy work". I wanted something beautiful for Advent. I used the project myself as a sort of meditative preparation exercise for Christmas.I wanted something that would link Junior Church with the all-age Christmas Day service. I liked the idea of a mystery that would become more and more understandable during Advent, to be revealed completely on Christmas.

And my other inspiration, besides the original stained glass window linked to yesterday, was Sarcastic Lutheran's congregationally-made Advent Icon. [She's moved her blog and I cannot track down the post right now to link to it, but it was created entirely of ad circulars - a transformation of the materialistic (and rubbish) into something holy.]

All this was too much burden for a single project to carry!!

Yet this is not to dismiss stf's comment lightly. As I move into ministry, leading and serving congregations, I will come up with liturgical suggestions which congregations will dislike, or find boring, or confusing. People will "mess up" my beautifully-designed plans. I do need to remember that worship is Process, not Product. May we all feel prepared, at the end of even the most muddled and "imperfect" corporate worship, to go forth to love and serve the Lord at home, at work, in our families and our communities.

advent art, part 4

It was a rush to get the collage ready for 4th Advent. I wasn't yet finished when stf came to collect me for Junior Church, so I brought the supplies with me. Once we'd got the classroom set up with our Godly Play materials, I sat down at a work table and carried on.

photo by seethroughfaith (I cropped most of myself out of it)

To my great disappointment, I realized that I had left at home the thick black magic marker with which I had planned to outline all the elements. This would have made Mary and Joseph's sleeves clearer, for example, and would have allowed me to draw in Jacob's staff. I had also still been undecided about whether to draw in windows and doors on some of the background houses, as in the original I had based this work on. But I just had to do without all that. 

photo by seethroughfaith

I have now turned the work over to the pastor, along with one important additional element - a manger, with a little head just visible nestled within the hay, surrounded by a golden halo. This will be attached to the poster collage as part of the all-age service on Christmas Day. I can't wait to hear whether and how this worked in the service (I'll be with my mother-in-law across Christmas, not here), and to see how it looks with the manger added.

(In all the rush, there was certainly no time to go over it all with a coat of Modge Podge, as I'd hoped. The pastor may find that some of the scraps begin to lift or curl. They can just be carefully left alone, or gently stuck down again with glue or paste. I hope to finish it off in the ways I'd intended after Christmas, maybe even in time for Junior Church on New Year's Day.)

advent art, part 3

By the third week in Advent, a good deal more of the picture had taken shape.

At least one child was pretty sure that this was going to be a picture of Jesus. 

(background: part 1, part 2)

advent art, part 2

(continued from yesterday)

Another problem with my art idea was that I wanted the children to be surprised by the end result. This meant not being able to tell them very much about why they were doing this cutting and pasting, and why everything was supposed to be the same color. So they lost interest fairly quickly. In hindsight, this seems a fairly obvious flaw in my plan!

And the final problem was that I found I was too invested in how I wanted this project to turn out. It wasn't primarily about the process - the final product was also extremely important to me. So I was really unable to let the children work on it freely. In the end, I did most of the work on this project myself. I did have a little help from one of the children (and another adult) on Thanksgiving Day, and three other adults gave me a little help on a couple of Sundays. But the bulk of it was me.

By the second Sunday of Advent (our first Junior Church session in Advent), I was able to place this in the room:

When asked, I explained that it was Advent art. I tried to remind them of the work they'd put into it the previous month (I'm not sure any of them really made the connection), and explained that it would be finished gradually during Advent. I wondered what they thought it might be. One suggested a boat (you can see the prow of the boat there in brown). Another said it looked like it would be a castle. Another suspected that we'd eventually see a priest in the middle. 

More tomorrow...

advent art, part 1

Way back when we had the children in Big Church for Fr Rupert's last service with us, I invited the children  to do some cut and paste work during the sermon. I had brought background shapes cut out of heavy card and asked them to cut out and paste scraps of similarly-colored paper onto them.

This was not an unqualified success. The biggest problem was that I'd set up so that they could choose whether to work on the floor or kneeling in front of chairs, using the chair as a desk... without having thought about the fact that every time a glue stick came down on a chair, a BANG would echo around our stone chapel.

the very beginning of this year's Advent art

More of the story of this year's Advent art will be posted tomorrow!

topical response work

The children in my Godly Play classroom are aged 2-6. They almost always choose to work with the art materials during Response Time, rather than story materials, and it's extremely rare that the artwork they do is [or rather, seems to me to be] related to the day's lesson, any lesson we've done, or anything to do with their spiritual lives at all!

In fact, it was striking when two new children joined us in the autumn, children who had been to Sunday School elsewhere. For the first several weeks, the older one drew pictures of Jesus on the cross, and the younger one often copied this. It seemed likely to me that the elder child was trying to do what s/he assumed would be expected. Otherwise, though, apart from rainbows when we do Noah's ark, I don't think any of the artwork has had anything to do with our lessons.

Most of the time I manage not to be bothered by this. I know that every week these children pay attention to a lesson, break bread together, and receive personal blessings from our pastor. They are given the opportunity to thank God corporately in song and individually in naming something that they're particularly thankful for that week. And so it's enough that in the Response Time they know that they'll be trusted enough to be left alone for a while if they want to be, while knowing that we will be happy to look at their work with them if they ask us to. It's enough that they are in a worshipful environment with adults who care about them.

That's enough.

But I was thrilled today when a four-year-old showed me this winding trail of glitter glue and explained, It's the road to Bethlehem.

EDIT: Just minutes after posting this, I was led to this Washington Post article about play, which reminded me that the more we limit the children's choice about what they do, the less it's play. And after all, the name of this curriculum is Godly Play.
h/t UMC Ministry with Children

Godly Play morning for (almost) all ages

Thank you, Leslie, for writing words of encouragement after my last post (about plans for today's Godly Play event), and also to my mother, who sent an email saying she was praying for us. My prayer had been that everyone would get something they needed from it.

There were thirteen of us in the circle. We had children aged 3-5, a young teen, a grad student, parents, adults without children, married couples, and at least one pensioner. We were people born in North America, the Middle East, Eastern Asia, Africa, and Europe (including Finland!). 

I told the story of "the Great Family" (of Abraham and Sarah), using a desert bag for the first time in our classroom. This prompted at least two people to make plasticine deserts in the Response Time. 

Some people responded to the literal distances in the story and the idea of emigration, while others responded more metaphorically, for example to the idea of travelling through the desert without the refreshment and guidance of a river. One person even connected ideas from this story with insights from a recent television documentary about the Second Law of Thermodynamics! 

In the picture below, you can see that Abraham's body has been buried under the "sand". 

Afterwards, I asked the children what their favorite part of the day had been. One said working with glue. Another said helping with the feast. However, the feast was something of a disappointment to at least one child, because there was no food, only drink (a decision I'd made because lunch was to follow almost immediately). Also, the children found some of the grown-up talk difficult to sit through: notice the two children amusing themselves below by wearing their napkins on their heads:

We ended our session with a very different kind of prayer time than we've had before. I put the desert out again, and handed around a basket of stones and blocks. Everyone took a turn and put one into the sand. If they wanted to, they said a prayer after doing so, either in their heart silently or out loud. 

I think this was the most successful prayer time we've ever had in Junior Church / Godly Play: we have one child who is often very awkward about prayer, but who seemed to handle this activity just fine. 

When we got home, Vandriver asked me what my favorite part had been. I said, "Entering the room after preparing the drinks for our feast [during the Response Time] and seeing everyone doing their work - whether chatting together over plasticine, making a glitter glue painting, taking a nap, or reading about prayer."

*sigh*

I did suggest that it would be nice to keep the new clay in separate colors, and to use the already-mixed army green clay if that wasn't important to you...

oh well... ;)

Mothering Sunday in Helsinki

Last Sunday was Mothering Sunday in the Anglican tradition. We have one English mother in our congregation who reminded me of this several times as the date approached. So I introduced our response time by saying that some children might like to work with the story materials, some might like to work with clay (plasticine), and that some might like to make a mother's day card. Fortunately for all concerned, the child in question did choose to make a mother's day card! (It was joyous and colorful, full of flowers and trees and hearts.)

Just as joyous and beautiful were the photos of last Sunday's Anglican service in Helsinki! These are from the chaplaincy with which my own congregation is affiliated. I got such a kick out of them that I had to share them, even though I wasn't involved in any way, or even present there.

The chaplain wrote, I'm told it's called 'messy church'

One of our best Sundays in a long time! We were delighted that 12 children came to a service that underlined that liturgy and the needs of children are not incompatible. Usually, there is a children's corner at the back of the church. Today, we moved that corner to the sanctuary, and while the regular Sung Eucharist went ahead as usual, Tuomas - with the help of some of the parents - did some painting with the children. 

The congregation was thus encouraged to see the children as in every sense belonging in the midst of the liturgy; and the children - who instinctively seem to know it anyway - greatly enjoyed their chance to teach the adults something. 

Do click on that photo of the Eucharistic prayer, and see how many children you can spot!