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Posts Tagged ‘Kids’

Actually Advent: A Late Resource

Posted in Faith, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on 18 December, 2012| 1 Comment »

I’m sure you’re all super-prepared for all the Advent happenings in your parish. But just in case you aren’t (or want to be extra-super-prepared for next year) I thought I’d share this brilliant alt.Advent series from Scripture Union that I just came across. They are posting a 2-3 minute daily animation of part of the Christmas story every day of Advent. The full animation, combining all the clips, is 47 minutes long – perhaps something to have on hand for early risers on Christmas Day…

These would be great for family devotions or to show in a service or school assembly. I might even show a few to the kids over tea this week. SU have posted a good number of other videos on their YouTube channel that would be useful for services or family bible times.

Here’s today’s lovely section of the story:

[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ePB5LiRETkQ%5D

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Actually Advent: Waiting Messily

Posted in Church, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , on 4 December, 2012| 1 Comment »

Christmas treeThings are gearing up for Advent activity in the parish. Tonight is our Messy Christingle service – the first that’s been held since we’ve been here. Early in Advent seems like a good time for this service and gives us an opportunity to advertise other Christmas services to our Messy Church folk, some of whom don’t attend on Sundays. We’re excited about the service and the opportunity we have to tell people the Christmas story and spend time together. I made 1.5kg of pastry this morning which this afternoon will be turned into mince pies to share afterwards.

So we’ve been in church just now, moving chairs and getting the ancient decorations out. The tree lights work, thankfully, but there is rather a lot of tinsel debris around where we’ve unravelled the silver from the gold from the red and sparkly shreds have floated to the floor. The church is not looking as ethereal as one might hope for Christmas because at the same time as we were tinselling, the builders were in knocking great lumps of plaster off the walls. They tell us the plasterers are coming on Thursday so hopefully the walls will be reinstated for the school Christmas service next week and the Infants’ Nativity the following week.

So it looks like we might have a bit of a Messy Advent here. Thankfully our God didn’t expect tidiness when he came to earth all those years ago. In fact he came *because* of the mess. That means we can wait in the mess as we look forward to his arrival.

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Anticipating Advent: Activities

Posted in Church, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on 28 November, 2012| 6 Comments »

Our big Advent activity in the Vicarage is always the Jesse Tree – a bare twig we cover in decorations that take us through the salvation story to Jesus. We don’t always manage to get all the way through the readings and the decorating, but we make an attempt each year and cover at least some of it.

If you’re thinking of following God’s story from creation to the birth of Christ with a Jesse Tree for the first time this Advent, an excellently easy way to get your kit together would be to use free printables. These colour-in ones over at Life Your Way look great – there are lots of others all over the internet if you don’t fancy the colouring in, or if you want different bible stories. You don’t even have to use a twig – an outline of a tree drawn on a poster would work just as well (and not take up as much space in the kitchen). In the next couple of days we’ll be digging out our battered Celebrations tin and hunting round for the decorations that went astray when we packed up last year.

Another great Advent activity, especially good for holiday clubs or the like, or if school breaks up way before Christmas, is making a Nativity set. You could use this gorgeous cut up and colour set by Dutch designer Marloes de Vries or buy a set of Nativity Shrinkles, which my kids had lots of fun with last year. My goddaughters have each been sent a set this year. Our schools break up on the Friday before Christmas, so we may not have time for colouring activities this year, but I shall keep the Marloes de Vries colouring to hand, just in case the kids need occupying. We may end up with a house full of nativity sets!

I’ve linked this post up with one of Tanya’s – she’s posting some Advent reflections over the next four weeks.

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Anticipating Advent: Counting

Posted in Church, Faith, Family, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , on 19 November, 2012| 1 Comment »

I know it’s still November, but honestly, you might need to send off for some Advent stuff before 30th November in order to start things from the beginning. I speak from experience, you understand. So order today and be prepared!

So today I offer you some counting resources to arm yourself with for when Advent begins a week on Saturday (or Sunday if you’re being liturgical about it).  I don’t mean counting your funds for Christmas shopping, nor the hours available for mincepie making, but counting down to Christmas in a way which helps to focus our minds on Jesus. This year I am aiming for an Advent of anticipating Christ, rather than one of anticipating shopping and panicking about whether the Christmas cards will make it out of the Vicarage before New Year’s Day. I am also an optimist.

This year I have an Advent candle ready with numbers and the names of Jesus so that we can think of one as the candle burns. We didn’t get very far down the candle last year due to forgetfulness and busyness but it’s always better to do something badly than not at all. So we’re trying again, with hope in our hearts.

 Then of course, there are always Advent calendars, which everyone loves. Peeking behind the hidden window is a morning treat. If we’re awake enough to remember to do it, of course. You can get some great ones online, ones which tell the Christmas story brilliantly. Try these links:

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Simply Changing Lives

Posted in Faith, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on 12 November, 2012| 1 Comment »

The Good Book Company have just released a great new retelling of the Life of Christ in comic book form by Jason Ramasami – it’s called Life Changer. I am putting in an order for some this morning – they are particularly suitable for teenagers, students and anyone who’s not big on reading. And at £3.99 each, they’re also ideal little extra Christmas gifts.

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Make a Monday Difference

Posted in Lads mags, Politics, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on 5 November, 2012| 6 Comments »

Last week I didn’t shop at our local Morrisons as usual. I was making a point to one of The Sun’s biggest advertisers because I support the No More Page 3 campaign. It was a pain to change the routine, but I wanted to continue to add my voice to that of nearly 52,000 people who have now signed the petition. No More Page 3 are asking The Sun to discontinue their degrading and ridiculous habit of placing a large photo of a girl wearing only her pants on Page 3. The campaign has been gathering strength over the last couple of months and I urge you to sign the petition and check out their Facebook page and Tumblr blog. Lucy Anne Holmes, who heads up the campaign, compiled this great video of some interesting conversations with male Sun readers:

On a related issue, Mike Beecham has recently relaunched a campaign for Modesty Wraps – covers for the Lads Mags magazines which are stocked in supermarkets and newsagents. Although some shops have these publications on higher shelves and behind screens, many do not and they can easily attract the attention of children (as well as making adults feel grumpy). I have had success complaining about the positioning of Lads Mags in supermarkets, so let’s see if this campaign can also gain some traction.

You can follow No More Page 3 and Modesty Wraps on Twitter.

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The Light of Christ, Pumpkins and Plenty of Sugar

Posted in Faith, Fun, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on 1 November, 2012| 4 Comments »

All our Trick or Treaters turned up whilst we were eating last night. But despite the bad timing (and a rather cold tea), we had lots of fun. We always ask kids to perform something in exchange for their sweeties, as they do in Scotland, but they were all pretty hopeless and in the end the Joker and the Engineer told jokes from their vast repertoire.

We told them about our Jesus pumpkin, which had a flame on one side and “Jesus” within a heart on the other, talking about how Christ brings light to our world and into our lives. And then we handed out sweeties and tracts. The damp weather put a few off, I suspect, but still a great opportunity to treat local kids and get to know the neighbours.

I was also tweeted a pic of a pumpkin carved by the supremely talented Liz and have spent all day wondering how angled the back-to-front Jesus carving had to be to get this projection. And also planning to try this next year…

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Sunday School Survival

Posted in Church, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on 24 October, 2012| 2 Comments »

Like Vicar’s wives up and down the nation (and around the world too) I am involved in our Sunday School – I teach about once a month and also help others by sourcing various materials. We base our teaching programme on the excellent TNT materials, which work well for our fluctuating numbers and wide age range. I supplement the TNT stuff with extra colouring and wordsearches. I have blogged previously on some of the sites I use for sourcing helpful extras, but now I have a couple of additional ones to share.

Mary at Mission Bible Class has a great site with lots of links and ideas, including helping children to pray and blank lesson plans.

I’ve been using Sermons4kids for a while, but only recently discovered their worship bulletins – these are great if you have an all age service with a visiting speaker who might not be that child-friendly. They’re also brilliant for your normal Junior Church. The bulletin contains colouring, wordsearch and other puzzles and can be printed back and front on an A4 sheet to give you a folded A5 bulletin. You can even customise it with your church logo!

The site is arranged using the Lectionary, but you can easily use the search facility to find the passage you’re using. You’ll find the bulletins (if there is one – they don’t seem to have them for every kids sermon on the site) at the bottom of the page eg see this one on Exodus 16.

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Dreaming of the Kingdom

Posted in Church, tagged , , , , , , , , on 22 October, 2012| 8 Comments »

We are very excited in the Vicarage. In about 2 weeks time, Dreamer will be joining us as our Families and Community Worker. Our church family are delighted to have appointed her and are looking forward to getting to know her as she comes to live and minister amongst us. In one of those ministry swings and roundabouts, a couple of days after she was appointed, our lovely Ministry Trainee Sweet Tooth decided that he wasn’t quite ready to step into ministry yet and left the Vicarage to start another course of study. So our house is a little emptier just now, although the children and other visitors (including Dreamer and her happy dog last week) seem to fill the place up well enough.

One challenge for Dreamer when she begins here will be leading our small youth group. Since the Vicar had A Very Important Meeting last week, I was helping out along with our new MT Radiohead and Cheery, a laughing lady from our congregation. The group has almost doubled in size since last year and in the meeting I attended the boy:girl ratio was 9:2, so testosterone levels were running pretty high. About a third of the kids have learning difficulties of some sort or another, which mainly means that attention spans can be rather limited. So, all in all, it was a pretty fizzy evening. But despite that, they still read the bible out loud and talked about what the narrow way looks like. And, as Dreamer said afterwards, noone died, noone was bitten and noone set fire to anything. I’m sure that many involved in youth work will recognise the experience of trusting that the Lord is working even when we don’t feel like much is going in!

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How to Hack Halloween

Posted in Church, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on 11 October, 2012| Leave a Comment »

Of course, Halloween is approaching before All Hallows Day, and over the last couple of years I’ve blogged a few different ideas that we’ve used in the Vicarage, and some that others have suggested to me. I had a poll where people owned up to whether they hide behind the sofa or not and I’ve put up a few pictures of alternative pumpkins. Last year I reflected that this sort-of-new-to-the-British festival is only going to get bigger, so we Christians need to have thought through our approach.

So this year we’ll be carving pumpkins and lighting our windows with a gospel message. We’ll have sweeties to hand out and ask the visitors to tell us jokes. Our youth group meet that night so they will be having some Light Party games and lots of sugared items. And we’ll be giving out gospel leaflets with all this too. The Good Book Company have three different ones available this year – a couple for primary school aged kids and one for teenagers. They’re 17p each at the most (discounts apply if you bulk buy). The Good Book Co also sell One Day Wonders, which has everything you need to run a Light Party (and one off events for Christmas and Easter too). Why not stock up now so you’re prepared for the inevitable rings at the doorbell?

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