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

visit a Godly Play classroom

Remember Sheila's post about her children's first visit to a Godly Play room? Here's a beautiful video tour of a one classroom in Australia.

Isn't that a gift, to show us their room? But perhaps like me you found it simultaneously frustrating. Did your fingers get itchy? I wanted to open that brown box on the Christmas shelf! (I'm guessing it contains "gold", incense, and myrrh.)

making do: the focal shelf

Recently I had the opportunity of presenting a Godly Play taster session to some of the children's workers at my English churches. Another local storyteller kindly loaned me materials for several stories so that I could furnish our space, surrounding the circle with lessons as we normally do in a Godly Play classroom. Understandably though, the local storyteller couldn't loan me the "top shelf" focal shelf materials since those were essential to their own classroom.

Most of my own Godly Play materials are in storage back in Finland. I was able to borrow the Circle of the Church Year materials (the "church clock") and Baptism materials (minus the Trinity symbols). So here's how I "made do":

This photo was taken before I had quite finished -
I did put the blocks into the clock correctly before we started!

The focal shelf, as its name suggests, provides a focus for the room. It is the most important shelf, and it locates Christ as having central importance. We have the Holy Family in the middle, which tells both that Jesus came among us at a particular point in history, and also that he is now everywhere, taking the whole world into his embrace. I represented this with my Risen Christ cross and a little Christmas ornament showing Mary, Joseph, and the baby Jesus.

(Of course the true Holy Family materials also tell of a family made up not just by blood but intentionally, incorporating the lowly (shepherds) and outsiders (the Magi, who were not Jewish). But I had to make do with what I had, and since I was not telling that story this time, I felt that what I had was good enough.)

On each side of the Holy Family we have a reminder of one of the names Christ gave himself, one of the metaphors he used. To the left we have "the Light of the World", the Christ candle. This was relatively easy to provide; we already had a white pillar candle and base at home. Below it are the (borrowed) liturgical materials about the sacrament of baptism, which pick up the theme by talking about us receiving the light of Christ.

To the right we have "the Good Shepherd", and below that the liturgical materials about Holy Communion, when we gather around the table to recall his words ("This is my body...") and to meet him in the bread and wine. I didn't have the World Communion materials, not even the Good Shepherd, but I had a Central American cross depicting Jesus as the Good Shepherd. At the beginning of my session I introduced people to the space a little, drawing their attention to different things, and I asked them to imagine Communion materials below the Good Shepherd image.

I used the furniture I found in the space I had; the focal shelf was made of a piano bench! The bench was high enough that I felt I needed to stand the crosses up somehow, so I made use of two brass flower vases that were already in the space. I covered this shelf/bench with a white cloth (a damask cloth napkin) since we were just at the end of Eastertide. (Usually there is a cloth, in the appropriate liturgical color of the season, beneath the Holy Family but not covering the whole shelf.) Below this are the liturgical materials for the Circle of the Church Year.

If you don't have easy and regular access to Berryman's books, the UK Godly Play site has really helpful resources about how to furnish a Godly Play space. (Even if you do have Berryman's books, you might find these resources a useful supplement.) In thinking about what to do for a focal shelf, I drew on my memories of the document, "Designing and building a Godly Play room", which can be found on the same UK Godly Play page. [[Since writing this post, I've also remembered this post about the Focal Shelf on the Three Great Days blog.]]

Just as a point of comparison, the very first focal shelf I ever created had a Christ candle and a tiny Holy Family. I regret, though, that I had no Good Shepherd at all. The shelf was spread with a cloth of the right color, and although I had no church clock I did have the other three liturgically-colored underlays laid out at the base of my shelf. I placed Advent materials on the left, spatially liked with the Christ candle, and Lenten materials on the right. (Endings that are also beginnings, circles and cycles link World Communion with the Circle of the Holy Eucharist, the Faces of Easter, and indeed the Circle of the Church Year. So in a classroom they are typically linked spatially as well.) Our space was tiny. I had so few materials that I didn't surround our circle with the lesson materials, but kept Noah's ark and our one parable box in this same set of shelves.

Is your focal shelf as you would like it to be? In what ways have you been able to "make do"?

setting up the room

Before:

 After:

Every time we do Godly Play, I set up the room like this. It is not a chore! I usually find that setting up the room helps me to prepare for the session. And sometimes I have help - one week a child who had arrived early positioned the Holy Family for me. I always have help with putting the furniture away and collecting the materials to be taken home again. 

(For a more detailed description of what is in our room, see the chart in this post and/or explanations of our different "shelves" in this post.)

Our new room, part 3

Our new room means:

• plenty of open space 
• permission to re-arrange furniture (if we put it back afterwards)
• four low benches, which I use as shelving and to define our circle
• windows which let in a lot of light (but aren't distracting)

but:

• it's large and echo-y (hard to walk slowly and speak softly)
• all the furniture apart from the benches is adult-sized

Here's how I'm setting it up for our sessions (I've used gray for furnishings in the room that we don't use). (You can click on the picture to enlarge it.)

.

For info on the various shelves, including the "getting ready" bench, scroll down to the "part 2" post. Our seating mats are Ikea bathmats, a great bargain at €1/mat. The Bible stand is just a music stand which was already in the room. The art materials are currently stored in a little wire trolley - not ideal, but lightweight, easily transportable, and something I already had in my attic.

Edited to add photo (from last week, before the addition of World Communion material):

Publish Post

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.