After 18 months of experimenting with using Godly Play with our 3-5 age group, I am in a position now to chat about it in a reviewing kind of way. Realised a while back that Godly Play ( GP) is a big part of how we do church with children, and yet from this website you would not know that. So, here I am to right that wrong.
I have been in the GP for 3 of the past 4 weeks, telling 2 stories myself, and being the doorkeeper while Libby was story teller. Already I have used peculiar terms so will stop right there! With the GP classroom, a lot of the work is done through setting up the sacred space for the children. So, the door keeper asks them to prepare to enter the room, helps them to listen and helps them with getting out their own equipment, tidying up their own stuff afterwards. This frees the story teller up to tell the story, and then to help children respond to the story and other stories.
Bet that makes it a lot clearer! I told the first 2 Advent stories – the light of the prophets, and the light of the holy family. There is a lot of repetition in the Advent series, as you build up the story, so this week Lib did the prophets, holy family, shepherds, Magi and the Christ Child. The story is told using wooden plaques, simple nativity figurs and candles. There is not much movement, and no wondering at the end of the story. ( Most GP stories include some group wondering after the story is told.) Instead, the children go straight into their responses, which include using playdough, water colours, sticking and colouring, and working with the story, or other stories.
Some fabulous response times – the desert box, containing sand, is popular, and has been used for volcanoes erupting and covering Bethlehem and the Christ child with sand, and Moses and Miriam making the journey to Bethlehem too, which is an interesting angle on the interactions between old and new testament. The 10 rules story has been popular, with the hearts with the rules to love others and love God being spread around the desert and collected up again in varying combinations. The children are really ‘getting’ that they can use the stories, and over half of them at any time areusing the stories- one boy playing with the ark every week, the parables being popular, and one girls showing a new girl every story we have done this term, plus some more from last year. The children’s recall is incredible – the same words and gestures as the story teller uses. I am told by one mum that her children stroke pieces of fabric and and move lego people around, telling stories and avoiding eye contact with anyone, as one of their favourite play activities at home.
A few weeks after we did creation, we had an amazing creation story board produced by a 5 year old boy who had magic gold coins featuring in the creation story. And why not? Creation is probably the most magical of magic things, so some gold coins would be in there somewhere. Two of the group were so bored and uninterested by ‘old style’ kids work, and have jsut been turned around by GP to using their creativity to respond to the story of God. I love that.
I love how the children are engaged, how attentive they are to the story, how responsible they are for the room and tidying up their things (and some of them are 3!), how gentle they are with each other and how little squabbling there is. I love how well the kids workers have taken on GP, and Libby’s story telling was amazing today. I sometimes worry that for most of the kids workers, their primary model of GP is me, so they copy my mistakes, but Libby seems to have avoided that and has developed her own style and it works beautifully.
We are planning some training with Lucy from Barnabas in January, and I hope many kids workers from the 7-10 age group will catch the GP bug – they intend to start using GP for the Lent stories. My own kids work adventure unfolds as I move out of 3-5s and into the toddlers. More about that in another rambling!
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