Each week we write a Constant Contact e-mail targeted to young families (and our elected vestry members! We’re sneaky that way…) At first we just listed upcoming schedule changes and that sort of thing, but we decided it was a good forum for opening a window into our classrooms for the parents. So each week I’d send a little e-mail off to the storytellers (we have two Godly Play classrooms) and ask what story they told, etc.
And each week I’d get a lovely paragraph back describing what happened that day! It’s really the best part of my week, and I am thankful that the storytellers are excited enough to write in such detail. These descriptions below are just as we send them. I edit them very slightly (to remove a child’s name or to edit out some housekeeping comment the storyteller might be sending my way) but otherwise they’re exactly as the storyteller reports. I hope you enjoy!
Woohoo! We’ve started! It was great to see everyone back together – our teachers enjoy starting back just as much as the children do!
The younger Godly Play class started out with “The Circle of the Church Year,” so that they will know how the church tells time. Sometimes Time is in a line, and sometimes it is in a circle. This story has one of our favorite lines in Godly Play: “For every beginning there is an ending, and for every ending there is a beginning. It goes on and on, forever and ever.”
 Many of the stories that we tell have a “Parent Page” that describes the story and offers some insights for sharing the story with your child. “The Circle of the Church Year” is one of those stories, so ask one of the Godly Play team for a copy. They are really well done, and we wish we had them for EVERY story!
The older Godly Play class is trying out a new frame for the fall – we are using the stories that often are part of the Jesse Tree, usually used during Advent. On Sunday, September 7, we talked about Jesse; we remember not only the family of Jesse, which begins a lineage that leads to Jesus, but the many people of the Hebrew scriptures who prepared God’s people for the coming of Jesus. We talked about foreshadowing – even though our stories will be all from the Old Testament, they offer clues about Jesus, so we’re looking for those clues! We heard the story of “Second Creation: The Falling Apart” – the story of Adam and Eve and the serpent. Our class blew us away with their insights on this rather difficult story. We talked about the differences: God/People; Good/Evil, etc. One student suggested the balance he saw in the story, which gave everyone food for thought. (No Parent Page for this one….)
