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Posts Tagged ‘Children’

How to Lead a Young People’s Bible Study. Or Not.

Posted in Bible study, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on 25 July, 2011| Leave a Comment »

On our Pathfinder Venture this summer we’ll be studying the bible in small groups with the young people. Our leader, Tim Ambrose, has made this great video with some very funny tips on leading a study:

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Free Seeds Song

Posted in Family, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , on 6 July, 2011| 1 Comment »

We love the kids music produced by Seeds Family Worship in the US. At the moment you can download a free memory song from their website – Romans 6v23.

For the wages of sin is death, but the gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord.

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Skittle Prayers

Posted in Faith, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on 4 July, 2011| 8 Comments »

Recently we have started a new way of praying in our Junior Church. I was fresh back from Bible By the Beach, and the fantastic youth and children’s work that went on there. And from there we have snaffled an idea which helps our youngsters to think of something to pray for, and that encourages them to pray for a variety of things. Our secret: sweeties!

Every week the leader goes armed with a packet of Skittles (M&Ms or Smarties would work too). They go in a bowl and at our prayer time each child takes a sweetie. Then they say a prayer triggered by the colour of the sweet. Depending on the colour selection, you can make up your own code. Ours is as follows:

  • Red – a sorry prayer
  • Purple – prayer for the sick
  • Green – prayer for the world
  • Orange – a thank you prayer
  • Yellow – prayer for the church
  • Blue (when we have the special packet) – anything you like!

This would work for any small group – even grown ups who want a different way to pray. And good for families too – our kids love it!

 

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Playdough Recipe: A Vicar’s Wife’s Standard

Posted in Craft, Kids, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , on 29 June, 2011| 1 Comment »

Last night we had a great time at Messy Church – the next one in our series on the ‘I am’ sayings of Jesus. This time we were looking at ‘I am the True Vine’ and the craft team decided that they’d like one activity to be making playdough grapes to place on a vine drawn on a paper plate. The Vicar then volunteered me to make the playdough, knowing that I had a recipe up my sleeve.

Every playgroup leader has a  recipe for playdough – that ubiquitous soft dough which mums hate to find in carpets. But many folk I’ve spoken to have found their homemade dough to be too sticky or oily. This recipe always seems to come out well, though, as long as you don’t mind your fingers getting a bit stained with food colouring. It lasts a few weeks if kept in an airtight box in the fridge.

Ingredients

  • 1 cup (250ml) plain flour
  • 1 cup (250ml) water
  • 1/2 cup (125ml) salt
  • 1 tablespoon oil
  • 2 teaspoons cream of tartar
  • Few drops food colouring

All you do is pop all the ingredients together in a pan (preferably non-stick) and heat it up, stirring, until the dough magically forms. You can also do it by heating it in a covered dish in the microwave for 1-2 minutes but it’s so fast on the stove top I use that method. Also, the food colouring can make the inside of a microwave dish look rather interesting.

I know these were meant to be grape coloured, but the local shop only sells colouring for pilau rice and Indian sweets, so the colours are a little lurid and approximate. For Messy Church I made a quadruple batch, which was ample. It’s great fun to hold and knead – we gave a couple of handfuls away to some of the teenage tearaways who were lurking in the church yard. One came in especially as he reckoned it would help him to deal with stress.

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Junior Church Help Online

Posted in Church, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on 21 June, 2011| 5 Comments »

I have recently started leading regularly at our Junior Church. When I began, we were using materials which were tailored to a narrow age range and which were tied to the lectionary and sometimes seemed to miss the point of the passage.

Since our group has an age range of 3-14 and we don’t follow the lectionary in church, we have now switched to using On The Way for 3-9s. Although this still misses the top age range we have, it caters for a greater number of the children, and also enables us to design our own programme of teaching.

On The Way has excellent craft resources and helps you to get into the passage you’re teaching yourself. It doesn’t, however, always help you to prepare the teaching of the passage very easily. At the moment we are doing a little series on some of the kings of Judah, which has been great for me as some of the passages were unfamiliar to me, let alone to the kids!

So to help me to tell the stories of some of the passages (and to source some good colouring pages for less well-known stories) I now turn to Deaf Missions – their daily reading notes are available online and give some excellent short summaries of bible passages together with clear black and white illustrations which blow up very well for colouring in. Check out their page on Jehoshaphat and Ahab to see what I mean.

I always like to have a colouring page and a wordsearch for the children – sometimes I like to get them to colour in a picture as I explain the bible passage, as it can help with concentration. And it’s always useful to have something up your sleeve in case the Vicar preaches too long and you’re in Junior Church for an unplanned extra ten minutes.

DLTK have a good selection of colouring pages. For wordsearches I tend to go to Calvary Church‘s site first – they also have colouring pages on many passages and other word puzzles, although the bible version they use (possibly the American Standard?) doesn’t usually mesh with the readings we use, so I don’t use the more complex puzzles. If the passage isn’t in the Calvary Church curriculum, I go to Teachers Direct, where you can make your own wordsearches – cool, eh? Unsurprisingly I used this when teaching about Jehoshaphat.

Do you have any favourite online places for Sunday School resources? Do share!

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A Formula for Trouble?

Posted in Fun, tagged , , , , , , , , , on 16 June, 2011| 2 Comments »

As we nibbled our rhubarb crumble cake and gingerbread loaf at Cake and Chat this morning, we were discussing (as usual) the state of the neighbourhood. Our local PCSO was visiting to eat cake catch up on intelligence and he and I were talking about the broken Vicarage windows and the local children who play together most evenings. Often there are more than a dozen of them, and they can often be playing out for four hours until the dark drives them home.

We decided that there is likely to be a mathematical formula for the likelihood of trouble eg broken windows that could be developed, using the number of children (C), the number of hours they spend unsupervised (H) and the amount of trouble (T). Something like this I would guess:

CxH = T

So if there are fewer children, or they are driven inside by rain after only an hour, or parents come and supervise, the amount of trouble is much less. The broken Vicarage windows didn’t happen first thing in the evening, but towards the end of things, and there were always a good few kids playing together.

Of course, the formula is really more complex than that, and should include such factors as emptiness of tummies, sugar recently consumed, time since the last big telling off and air temperature. Perhaps if I work on it I can develop the definitive predictor of Trouble and head it off before it comes. Or maybe I should stick to prayer and building relationships.

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Books for Camp: School Survival

Posted in Books, Church, Faith, Teenagers, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on 13 June, 2011| Leave a Comment »

In my quest for suitable books for the young people on our Pathfinder venture this summer, I picked up School Survival by Catherine and Louise House. Louise is Catherine’s school age daughter and some of this book is based on the experiences she had when she moved school. And although it’s called School Survival, it’s particularly about friendship and working that through, with a single chapter about starting in a new school. It is very suitable for the Pathfinder age group (11-14) as it covers many issues faced as young people move on to secondary school.

The book is a combination of stories, quizzes, activities and bible study and is split into 14 chapters, including ones on making friends, bullying, gossip, prayer and church. It might be suitable for a Year Six primary school leaver to study over the summer holidays, or for family devotions or even as an outline for a church Pathfinder group to study over a few weeks (the chapters are uneven in size, so some could be combined). I’ll be ordering a few copies for our camp bookstall.

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All Age Service Illustrations to the Max

Posted in Church, Faith, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , on 6 June, 2011| 18 Comments »

All age services are a great way for families to worship together, but it can be a real challenge to keep them fresh and accessible. This weekend we began a new series for our monthly All Age gatherings. We are going through Colin Buchanan’s great song ‘Big Words that end in SHUN’, from his Super Saviour album, teaching a big word each month:

Big words that end in SHUN!
Show us what the Lord has DONE!
Through Jesus, His own SON!
Big words, Big words that end in SHUN!

Revela-­‐SHUN!
God shows himself to us
Substitut-­‐SHUN!
Jesus takes our place
Salva-­‐SHUN!
Sinners saved from hell
Big words, Big words that end in SHUN

Propitia-­‐SHUN!
God’s anger turned away
Justifica-­‐SHUN!
Just like we’d never sinned
Imputa-­‐SHUN!
Jesus’ righteousness is mine
Big words, Big words that end in SHUN

Resurrec-­‐SHUN!
Raised from death to life
Redemp-­‐SHUN!
Sinners bought by God
Adop-­‐SHUN
Sinners made God’s sons
Big words, Big words that end in SHUN

This Sunday we tackled REVELA-SHUN and the Vicar spoke on Hebrews 1:

In the past God spoke to our ancestors through the prophets at many times and in various ways, but in these last days he has spoken to us by his Son, but in these last days he has spoken to us by his Son…

So the Vicar decided that we could get Dr Who to come and take us back to meet a few of the prophets to find out what they had to say. Suddenly plans were afoot for the construction of a tardis and the Queen, the Joker and the Engineer were very pleased to spend a day in half term wielding paintbrushes.

Tardis construction in the back yard of the Vicarage

Once it was painted, the Joker decided that our tardis should be manned by Doctrine Who. And so here is the finished item in our front drive, being shown off by Doctrine Who and an enemy (although my knowledge of Dr Who isn’t sufficient to tell you which enemy it is). It went down very well on Sunday morning, and is now installed in the boys’ bedroom, where time-travelling adventures continue.

Doctrine confounds an alien

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Reading. Or Not.

Posted in Faith, Inner city, tagged , , , , , , , , , on 1 June, 2011| 3 Comments »

Last week my two younger kids were in bed, but they were having trouble getting to sleep. That was mainly because some of their classmates were still playing loudly in the street below our house. The youngest of the kids still playing out was eight. And it was 8.30pm, so I thought it probably appropriate that they go home and possibly even consider going to bed themselves.

When I proposed this to them, they were incredulous. They didn’t want to go to sleep yet. So I suggested that perhaps they could get into their pajamas and read a book before bedtime. The eight year old then emphatically told me:

Books are for BABIES!

A report from the National Literacy Trust has been in the news this week, talking about how book ownership is linked to educational attainment. We have lots of work to do here if the children of our parish are going to reach their potential. And be able to read their bibles so that they can know the living Word.

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Books for Busy Mums (and Dads) Part 2

Posted in Family, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on 27 May, 2011| 1 Comment »

Last week I blogged about some poetry books that I like to read with my own kids, and with the schoolchildren that I spend time reading with each week. The other resource that I use every week at school and that my gang at home have loved are a series of short stories, two in each book which come in a series as ‘A Pair of Jacks’.

There are four books in the series, written by Michael Lawrence and illustrated by Tony Ross. Each story is about 60 pages long, with large print and good pictures. What makes them great for readers all through Key Stage 2 (the Juniors to those of us who went to school before the National Curriculum) is that although there are not many words, there is much rich vocabulary and lots of fun with literary form in just a few pages.

Fiction-averse boys have enjoyed these stories as much as the girls – they are clever and humourous. They often play around with classic stories – the first one in the book shown above is called ‘Jack and the Broomstick‘ and is a parody of Jack and the Beanstalk – great for more able kids to think about how the original story has been subverted, but simple enough for the less able to enjoy aswell. This week I was reading from Jack-in-the-Box with a few of the children and we were discussing the meaning of ‘console’, ‘magnanimous’ and ‘ingrate’ as well as the frequency of orphan stories in children’s literature.

I’m planning a bit of a Jack-fest this half term with my kids – I’m going to see how receptive they are to guided reading with Mummy. Wish me luck – it’ll not be the books that are the problem if it goes wrong…

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