A foray into Godly Play, part two

Yesterday I explained a little bit about what Godly Play is, particularly as it's conceived for a faith education classroom in a church. We, however, use Godly Play at home rather than in a church setting (though there has been some discussion about introducing Godly Play elements at our church).

Our Godly-Play-at-home experience is a bit more relaxed (maybe sometimes too relaxed), less formal and structured than in a classroom setting. We typically tell the stories at our dining table, often in the evening after baths but before bedtime routines. This seems to be the best time for us to practice storytelling together, a time when we're all together and not pulled in different directions, but we're still working on establishing a consistent pattern, particularly as extracurricular activites often make our evenings late.

Though I would like to work up to adding a creative work time to our Godly Play experience, at this point we're mainly playing with the stories and haven't established a creative response time. It's been fun, though to see our kids respond to the stories. We often give them a chance to tell the stories after we have introduced them, which allows the kids a time to process and manipulate the story elements.

There are only a few resources we need for at-home Godly Play. The most important resource is a storybook, of course! Though the church curriculum involves quite a number of script books, we're using the book Young Children and Worship, by Sonja Stewart and Jerome Berryman, which contains all of the basic stories for the church year. We also have its later companion book Following Jesus, which contains a lot of the Gospel stories that aren't in the first book. These two books are great for at-home use because not only do they have the story scripts, they also have directions, diagrams, and patterns for making story elements at home.

The most daunting aspect of Godly Play to me, initially, was the need to gather and make story elements. Though you can buy beautiful wooden sets for the stories, they're expensive and not a good option for us. But the most important part of Godly Play is experiencing the story, not having beautifully hand-crafted elements, and there are a number of ways to collect at-home story sets with minimal prep work and items that you may already have on hand. I have done such things as:

• create posterboard figures using the patterns in Young Children and Worship
• build cityscapes and tables using cardboard or foam board
• create buildings using regular wood play blocks
• use peg people or Lego people or Fisher Price Little People for story characters
• pull out fabric scraps or felt pieces for story underlays

My storyscapes are not beautiful, but they serve the purpose of making a story come to life (though I'm trying not to use the Lego or Fisher Price people too much just because they can be a distraction!). We also don't have the space or the baskets to have separate boxes for every story, so instead we just use a couple photo boxes in which we collect all of our story pieces. I try to keep one story basket on the table that contains the story items for our most recent story.

There are a number of other blogs that are great to explore if you're thinking about starting Godly Play at home. Here are a couple of my favorites:

• Watkins Every Flavor Beans has a great series of posts about getting started with Godly Play at home, including ways to use what you already have.
• My favorite blog for doable Godly Play inspiration is Explore and Express, written by an American expat living in Germany, so her blog is in both German and English! She shares some of what they do at home, at church (a small church plant) and in the schools (because German schools teach religion).  I could spend hours searching there.
• YouTube also has videos of info about Godly Play and of trained leaders telling many of the stories, which is a great help to those of us who haven't seen it done in person.

And here are a few pictures of some stories we've played with at home:


One of my first attempts, for the parable of the Great Banquet.



Palm Sunday - that's a posterboard Jesus on donkey



Creation - making and laminating the individual cards was
more labor intensive than most of the stories we have done

For a few weeks in the spring I tried to correspond our at-home stories with the stories the kids were learning about in Sunday School, but in the end I decided to give that up because it was hard to plan for it, and I like sticking to the timeline of Young Children and Worship. Now we have started back at the beginning - Creation - and are going to work our way through the Young Children and Worship book.

This week while I was out running errands one evening, I asked Brian to have the kids tell him the Creation story (because he hadn't been home when we introduced this story). He told me later that our 4-year-old took the first story card (which is supposed to depict "God made light") and said, "God made us a big present." Well, yes, exactly! God made us a big present. And how wonderful that we can explore it together!