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Posts Tagged ‘VeggieTales’

The Joker is teaching Junior Church tomorrow. If we have some kids in… Yes, we have got to that stage of life here – where the teenagers are taking up leadership roles. The Joker and the Engineer and their pal Miss Clean all teach at our Kids’ Club on Wednesday evenings. The group is thriving – recently they’ve had almost twenty kids most weeks. All three of them run games, give short talks and take responsibility for the group in many different ways. It’s a real pleasure to see them maturing into service – and enjoying themselves in the process

And the Joker and Miss Clean also teach the small (but perfectly formed) group that meet on Sundays. It was a bit of a shock for them both when they started. Instead of a good size group of kids that includes every age from 5 to 11, we normally have a couple of small girls, aged 3 and 5. Although sometimes we get others. But we still teach them a proper curriculum. And tomorrow is the final session of a short series in the book of Esther. Which happens to be the Joker’s favourite book of the Bible, ever since he developed a serious crush on the VeggieTales Esther at the age of five.

VeggieTales Esther

I guess she’s pretty for a spring onion

And the theme of tomorrow’s session is how God does the impossible – saving his people from certain death by sending his saviour – for such a time as this, at just the right time. A truth that gives us hope for today and for all the days to come, even when facing uncertainty and global turmoil. For entertainment in the Vicarage this evening, the Joker practised the opening illustration – cutting up an A4 piece of paper so that he can walk through it. Impossible, you say? But look! Ta-daa!

Teenager stood in paper cut up so that you can step through it. In messy living room

The Joker does the impossible

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We’ve had many favourite kids’ bibles over the years in the Vicarage (and previously in the Curatage, the Ordinandage and the Engineerage). Top reads have included The Jesus Storybook Bible, the Big Picture Story Bible, the Praise Bible (sourced in a secondhand shop) and (when they were very little) The God Loves Me Bible. For a while the Engineer was very keen on the Veggietales Bible Storybook, and whilst I wouldn’t recommend it for teaching kids great doctrine or anything, his enjoyment more than made up for the struggles we had with reading about Dave and the Giant Pickle repeatedly. I think he learnt to read his first words from that book. As I recall, they were ‘God’ (yay!) and ‘Dave’ (not such a yay for that one).

Our kids love variety so we are always hunting for the newest best bible. All our kids can read a ‘proper’ bible now and the Engineer had been using an International Children’s Bible and the excellent XTB bible reading notes. He’d just finished a set of notes when I went on my conference the other week, where there was a hard-to-resist bookstall where they were selling The Gospel Story Bible.

I had a look through and decided that the 7yo Engineer might enjoy reading through this for a change from his bible notes. The way in which the bible stories are told pointing to Christ are so helpful. And each story comes with a few questions to help the child clarify what they’ve read and learnt. And this evening the Engineer skipped into the kitchen just before bedtime and told me he’d read three bible stories all by himself. He was so excited to communicate all that he’d learnt about the plagues and the Passover.

That’s a winner of a bible for me. Which bible do your kids read or have read to them? Do you have a family favourite?

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Our kids don’t watch much telly. In fact, we don’t even have a TV licence, though we have a whole cabinet of dvds. They watch it in the mornings at the weekends, and in the holidays (and sometimes play PS2 now instead).

On Sunday mornings, they watch something Christian before church. So far, the viewing has been mainly VeggieTales (we love those show tunes) and Colin (very funny with good music). I think we pretty much have complete sets of both of them.

The kids have watched those dvds tons, so we were pleased to find a new series of Christian dvds recently. It’s called Torchlighter ‘Heroes of the Faith’ and the dvds are cartoon stories of various Christians through the ages.

Inspiring Sunday morning viewing

Inspiring Sunday morning viewing

We bought ‘The Gladys Aylward Story‘ a couple of weeks ago. It made me weep as I watched. The kids loved it so much they watched it twice in one sitting.

We’ve ordered four more as a set, with the stories of Eric Liddell, John Bunyan, Jim Elliot and William Tyndale. I’m looking forward to seeing them, though I shall make sure the tissues are handy.

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