He Said: Godly Play with Preschoolers (1st Semester)

The Creation Story from Young Children and Worship

My wife and I have danced around using Godly Play with our kids and at our various churches since we were introduced to it at a CBF-Georgia General Assembly break-out session about 8 years ago.  Susan jumped on it more quickly than I did and bought the book, Young Children and Worship, several years ago.  She has already blogged about using Godly Play with our children here and here.  Attending the Children, Youth, and a New Kind of Christianity conference in May of 2012 renewed my desire to change the way we introduce our children to faith.  At my church, I am not only the Children's Minister, I am also the director of our weekday preschool program.  I decided over the summer that I was going to start using Godly Play to share God's Story with the 2-4 year olds during our weekly chapel time.  

There are 40 stories in the Young Children and Worship book.  Because our school year runs from September-May, I had to work around school breaks, and I wanted to follow the lectionary calendar as closely as possible, I could only cover 30 of the stories in YCAW.  I wanted to hit the essential Old and New Testament stories, but I still had to leave out things I wish I could have included.  Here are the stories I covered in the Fall semester:

Creation

Exodus

The Ten Best Ways to Live

The Ark and a Tent for God

The Promised Land

Exile and Return

Advent: The Prophets Show the Way to Bethlehem

Advent: Mary and Joseph Show the Way to Bethlehem

Advent:The Shepherds Show the Way to Bethlehem

Advent: The Magi Show the Way to Bethlehem

One of the first things you need to know is that it takes a lot of prep time to prepare to tell the stories from YCAW.  Each story requires you to prepare or construct some or all of the following: people figures, a landscape or background, buildings, biblical items (the ark, altars, etc.), picture cards.  You also have to gather supplies like baskets, candles, and stones to use to tell each story or hold the materials.  YCAW has templates for all the figures and buildings that you can photocopy and use.  Where they don't have templates, they do have instructions and diagrams on what to make.  The book recommends you make the figures out of wood, but that is REALLY time-consuming and potentially difficult if you don't have the proper woodworking tools.  There are several places online where you can buy the story-sets pre-made like Worship Woodworks and Godly Play Resources (the official Godly Play store).  Complete sets are expensive though, ranging in price from $90 to almost $400!  Not very helpful for your budgets!  As an alternative, I have been photocopying the templates for the figures from the book and either pasting them to posterboard or laminating them before I cut them out.  Some of the materials I have made from cardboard and painted or from other random woodscraps that I have at home or church.  I have also collected a lot of the other materials like fabric from what I already had.  

My plan now is to make an individual post for each of the above stories.  I will share what materials I used to put the story together, including any shortcuts or effective substitutions I discovered.  I also want to reflect on how telling the story went for each age group and share the things I noticed about their attention and interaction with each story. I hope that you will find these posts useful.