making do - your Godly Play room

If yesterday's post, with the video tour of a "real" Godly Play room, or Sheila's recent post about spacious children's worship areas in Texas left you frustrated or discouraged - I hope this will undo that. Many of us have to "make do" with a space that feels less than ideal. But it's ok to do the best we can!

The minimum I would want is this: The space that is clearly a prepared space. It has been made special. It is both special ("set apart", even temporarily) and welcoming (for us). So if your circle will be made up of children, this should be a space which is set up with children in mind. There is a "threshold" of some sort, so that it is easy to tell the difference between IN the space and OUTSIDE the space. In the space there is a focal shelf, as well as materials for response and for cleaning up. Everything is displayed in an inviting manner (in open baskets, on low shelves if children are present) but also with care, so that it all looks orderly. Everything has a place. And that includes the people - there are mats or cushions or chairs enough for everyone.

You can stop reading right here. This, I believe, is enough.

doing Godly Play in my living room

If possible, the circle of participants will also be surrounded by the lessons and story materials. Again, these should be displayed in an orderly yet inviting way. Take care the first time you set things out, because ideally you will ever after always put them in the same place! Sacred stories should be together, arranged chronologically from left to right, with the core stories most visible and enrichment lessons stored beneath them. Parables are in a clearly different place. And liturgical action lessons are usually located near or beneath the focal shelf.

A piano bench is pressed into service as a parable shelf.

It is not necessarily a problem if everything needs to be set up and taken down each time. I have found that setting up is an excellent way for me to prepare myself for the session. After several months, once children had learned the layout of the classroom, then I would accept any offers of help that came from children who had arrived early. They had already learned to treat the materials with some care, and usually knew where to put them. [If you do this, you will need to think about how they enter the space - what if your threshold is not set up yet? and will you ask them if they are ready as they arrive?]

Can you spot a Parable box?

Don't forget to think about what cleaning supplies will be needed. In a future post I'll write about some optional extras that are nice to have in the room. Cleaning supplies, though, are not an optional extra. In Montessori fashion, we are confident that everyone will be able to clean up after themselves. They may need to be shown how, but they are then encouraged to carry on themselves. In fact, cleaning (or a task such as sharpening all the pencils) is a perfectly acceptable Response Time activity!

These chairs also served to delimit the space.

You don't have to replicate Jerome W. Berryman's diagram exactly! My Godly Play training took place in a room with a slightly odd shape, in which the obvious place to put the focal shelf was not (as is usually recommended) the first place you saw upon entering the room. One of the trainers commented that she was happy not to be using an "ideal" room for training but instead showing us how to "make do". 

Godly Play training classroom

Some related posts:

• Setting up the Room (before and after pictures of our space in Finland)
• Looking into our room
• Our room when we had fewer materials (several photos)
• A diagram of where I put what (in our Finnish room)
• Making do - the focal shelf
• A change of venue - a tale of a lack of preparation and a lot of making do

all the time we need

Godly Play is one of those activities which encourages you to step out of clock time, from chronos to kairos. The goal is to be able to say, We have all the time we need (and mean it!).

Last year, Junior Church felt awkward and rushed. We left the adult service at the gradual hymn and rejoined them at or after the Agnus Dei. We could never predict how long the sermon and intercessions would last, so either guessed what time to return (sometimes bumbling in long before the AD, sometimes arriving to find the organist patiently playing twiddly music and all the adults waiting for us) or, worse, we would be summoned by someone bursting into our room calling, We're starting communion! Little time to put crayons away properly, certainly not time for prayer or a blessing. It was chaotic.

Now, though, we have all the time we need. If we are running a bit behind, the priest waits for us, and the parents are not impatient because they are enjoying coffee and fellowship. If the priest is running late, well, we can usually find something to do to fill the extra time.

a public domain image!

Last week, a child accidentally went off the paper with a crayon. Unfortunately, this child was pressing hard for a wonderfully brilliant and bold color, which ended up where it should not have. I breezily said, No problem. You know where the cleaning supplies are! (That was before I had looked at the stain.) Then I walked over to give moral support and my heart sank. I truly didn't think we would get that stain up. But I knelt down and explained what elbow grease is, and after a bit we began to share the work. I sprayed and the child scrubbed, and we made progress little by little. We swapped roles for a while, and then swapped back. I don't know how long we worked. When Vandriver arrived we hadn't even started the feast... but you could no longer see where the stain had been unless you knew - and once we stood up I lost it altogether.

We then calmly had our feast, a short prayer time, a blessing and our dismissal song.

The child's sense of accomplishment can only rival mine! The stain was not a disaster, children can clean up after themselves, and we had all the time we needed.

cleaning

One very important aspect of Montessori education and activities is the idea that when children do a task they do it from beginning to end. A child chooses an activity, collects the materials, does it, cleans up any spills or mess, and then returns the materials to their place. It is also possible for a child just to clean for the sake of cleaning, whether because something is dirty or to practice their scrubbing skills or play with water or enjoy the clean scent ...

Part of my dilemma is to figure out how to make this work within the confines of our situation. We do not have a sink in our room, and we have to set up and take down everything we use every time we meet. 

I have not been willing to introduce painting in Junior Church. I’m not yet up for collecting a bunch of smocks and the wherewithall to clean paint brushes, let alone the materials for cleaning spills and mistakes. And I do not have any polish in my room. Godly Play books encourage the idea of metal polishing as an activity, even going so far as to recommend the use of some “cheap” metal objects which will tarnish easily and need regular cleaning. But so far I've been unable to find any metal polish which isn't labelled Keep out of the reach of children.

When we started in February we had just a bottle of all-purpose spray cleaner and a roll of paper towels (kitchen roll), along with the waste basket and broom/dust-pan which were already in the room. The spray cleaner I bought, Helea, has several advantages and a couple of disadvantages:

Advantages:

• environmentally friendly
• locally produced (in Finland)
• kind to the skin
• smells nice (orange & rosemary)

Disadvantages:

• an adult-sized bottle
• limited control of error

See - I’m learning Montessori lingo! As I understand it, control of error means that a person should be able to tell whether or not they’ve done something right, without a teacher telling them. The problem with our cleaner is that it’s not colored at all, and sprays a wonderfully fine spray – which means that it’s very hard to see on a table or the floor once you’ve sprayed it. (And our children are still learning how to aim a spray bottle and squirt it.) I was a little tempted to switch to Tolu, which foams as it sprays so is easier to see. But that spray mechanism is significantly larger even than the one on our Helea bottle.

I’ve solved the bottle weight problem by getting a smaller, recycled spray bottle from a mother (thank you!), and pouring half the cleaner into that. So now we have two bottles, both of which are lighter. There's so much more to tell, but this post is getting pretty long already. Possible future topics include the lessons I've given about spray cleaning, the other things I've added to our cleaning basket, the problems which remain, and the cleaning victory that one child and I had this week. But for now I'll just sign off for now with a photo:

the Response Time

[written on 8 March; scheduled for automatic posting on 16 March]

Part of the pattern of a Godly Play session is that after a lesson or story is presented, there is usually some time for wondering about it together, out loud or silently or both. And then there's time (We have all the time we need) for each member of the circle to respond to the lesson in whatever way they feel is right for them that day.

• by touching and working with the story materials
• by writing a poem or a prayer
• by sitting quietly
• by working with art materials

There's also the possibility that they may want to return to an earlier lesson or an earlier unfinished art project. A person might notice that something needs doing - sharpening pencils or cleaning the art trolley. Ideally the focus is on the process rather than the product. It's a time to just be with God, working on whatever is important for you to be doing. 

We have several very young children in our group, and I'm not at all certain that they really see a connection between the lesson and their artwork yet. I hope that will come. I trust that they nonetheless feel that they are in Godly space while they explore ways of flattening plasticine or enjoy the bright colors of glitter glue or learn how to squirt a spray bottle of cleaning fluid. 

Here's what our art materials looked like for the first month:

Since then, I've been scouring the flea markets looking for small upright baskets, suitable for displaying pencils and crayons in an even more appealing way. I was also really pleased to find little plastic trays for rolling out plasticine on and a (new but inexpensive) child-sized rolling pin.

Another great flea market find was a folding magazine rack for only two euro. It meant I could get the drawing paper, cardboard sheets, and the "work in progress" folder out of those paper shopping bags.  I think it makes the paper look much more appealing; it's easier to see the range of choice available. The only down-side is that individual sheets of paper materials can slide out through the bottom and onto the floor. But I explained that that happens sometimes and not to worry. The fact that the rack folds up means it's easy to transport back and forth every week. I love it!

Advent - at my house

We had no Junior Church today, because on the last Sunday of each month we gather together, all ages, for a child-friendly service.

This gives me a chance to go back in time and write about December, when this Godly Play project really began to get off the ground. Our normal Junior Church meeting place was taken up with Christmas activities, and we had nowhere to meet. It was suggested that maybe we could meet in the sacristy (where the priests get ready for services), or possibly in a side chapel, but with a busy schedule of Christmas concerts and carol services I was worried that we would be in the way and get distracted. But what other solution was there, except to cancel Junior Church altogether during Advent?

Why, Junior Church at my house!

The first week I kept it to a single family - two children. They walked in and made straight for the shelf of materials, touching them gently, with interest and delight. I told the stories for the first two weeks of Advent (the first Sunday in December was already the second Sunday of Advent), and they were rapt with attention. They wanted the third plaque already, but I said, No, not until next Sunday. 

I had laid out some art materials next to the kitchen table: crayons, colored pencils, and clay. Clay! CLAY! We had never had clay before at Junior Church. That was what both of them wanted to do in their work time. And then we had our first feast. I was delighted by how easy it was to get them to stop working with the clay and clean up when they knew a feast was coming. After the feast I thanked each of them for coming and said that Junior Church was over, and they could play freely until their parents came to collect them. But the wonderful mood of Godly Play lasted right through.

Our new room, part 2

One feature of Godly Play (in an ideal set-up) is that the participants are surrounded by the stories and language of the church. All materials have a place, so that children can find them easily and so that they know how to put them away. The placement also signals some of the relationships between stories - all parables are stored together, for example.

We have four low benches at our disposal in the room we use. All four are dragged into a large square, to define our circle space. One I have designated as the "getting ready" bench, in the absence of an official door person. If children need a space in which to take extra time to get ready, there it will be. (So far, it hasn't been tested. We haven't needed it or even talked about it.)

The other three benches are used as shelving for lesson materials.

The focal shelf: Although really a circle has no sides, there is still a sense that this is the front of the circle. Here we have the holy family and the risen Christ (you can see a close-up on the "About Godly Play" tab), center stage. To the left is the Christ candle, and underneath it are the materials for the baptism lesson. There is a glaring empty space on the right, which will be filled soon.

On one side of the circle is the parable shelf: So far we have only one parable box, but I have most of the materials almost ready for another one, which will come eventually. At the end closest to the front are the Palm Sunday materials, which we worked with a lot during Lent last year. (This is the "Jesus the King" story, from Young Children and Worship.)

And on the other side of the circle is the sacred story shelf: Here again, there's only one story so far ("The Great Flood", with an ark and two baskets of figures). And mirroring the Lenten materials on the other side of the room, the Advent materials are at the end of the bench closest to the focal shelf.

Then there is a Bible stand (with a basket of Bible storybooks below it), our art materials, cleanup supplies, and a 'prayer and peace' basket.

a Frälsarkransen (Lutheran prayer bracelet), a holding cross, and a peace flower

I think that last basket is the only thing in the room that none of the children have been introduced to. It is just there waiting until it is needed, or wanted, or until somebody "discovers" it and asks about it.