Flame: Creative Children's Ministry

I've put together a discovery basket for younger children when we do our Easter family activities morning. This basket looks at the story of Palm Sunday and I'll have some story books with it so that parents can help children to engage with the items! Contents include:  Donkey puppet, plastic palm leaves, palm crosses, a crown, strips of fabric of different textures (to represent the cloaks put on the ground). Coconut halves (donkey hooves!), bells to make some noise, a heart, a stone (to represent the road Jesus travelled along) and a small tin with magnetic letters spelling 'hosanna' and 'Jesus.'

I'm a believer in children never being too young to absorb aspects of faith, so I thought I would have a go at making a 'quiet' book out of felt that would introduce Christian symbols in a touchy feely way. While the title 'quiet' book always raises my eyebrows slightly because I like children being a bit noisy, I can understand why the soft nature of the felt lends itself to that title.  It definitely keeps the children occupied! Some of the tinier members of our congregation have enjoyed using the book and one elderly lady in particular was fascinated by it and I had to discreetly take it out of her hands! Don't be fooled.  This book is sewn and glued together in a very basic way because I don't have time for elaborateness! I'd love to see what other people come up with :-) Felt people attached to ribbon candles with flaps opened to reveal flames Unzipped heart containing felt people stuck to a length of ribbon A Cr...

Sometimes it's hard to think of how babies can be included in the themes of a story we're telling at church.  I've been finding out something about treasure baskets recently.  Have a look at this excellent post from  Little Acorns to Mighty Oaks  that explains so much more about how treasure baskets can be made and used. I wanted something I could use with the story of Jesus calming the storm and thought that a box with a rough/smooth theme would fit the bill- reflecting the rough/smooth water of the storm/calm. I cheated a little bit and put a velcro curler into the box (plastic is not usually allowed but the velcro on it has a great texture!) The box includes:  cork backed coaster (smooth) wooden block (smooth) wooden spoon (smooth) ribbon (smooth) pine cone (rough) natural exfoliator pad (rough) unused shoe brush (rough) velcro curler (rough) pastry brush (rough and smooth)

I've been doing a little bit of experimenting with sensory bottles this week as I wanted to make some to help under 5s to explore the story of Jesus Calming the Storm.  Sensory bottles are great!  They're easy and cheap to make and provoke a lot of wonder-even in the adults who play with them!  Children can use them in a very reflective way, watching the shapes and colours and we've used them before in prayer activities for over 5s. Here's what I've made so far... 1. Water, green glitter and blue seed beads 2. Rice and matchsticks (to make rain/ storm noises) 3.Water, blue and green sequins and blue and green mini Pom-poms  4.Water, coloured with a little bit of blue food colouring  (filled to just over half way up the bottle), topped up to the top of the bottle with baby oil. 5. Baby oil, blue and green sequins and blue loom bands. As you can see, the idea was to keep with a blue/green 'water' theme. The baby oil and water mix is great as there ...

I've used cornflour and water mixtures with children in creche before and know how much they love playing with it! Having spent some time on Pinterest, I now realise that the mixture is called 'oobleck'- always good to have a name for what you are playing with! It struck me that oobleck is a really simple but effective way of helping to teach children about gentleness. The best part is that anyone can join in because oobleck appeals to everone from toddlers to adults (plus it can get a bit messy, which only adds to the appeal!) You will need: cornflour, water (roughly half as much water as cornflour) Mix the water and cornflour together and then pour the mixture out onto a tray. As the children play with the oobleck, they will notice that the slower and more gentle their actions, the more liquid the mixture is and the easier it is to move fingers through it.   Hard, sharp actions, such as slapping down on top of it will meet with solid resistance! ...

By Catherine Ward I'd been thinking for some time about how to allow the creche children some more chance for some big movement in the creche room. We don't have wheeled toys, not because I think they're a bad idea just because we haven't really lots of space. The children have, however, always loved the little slide that we have, the seesaw and the tunnel. I wanted something fairly small and static so that in didn't invade on anyone wanting to be quiet with the sand or some books but would give some more possibilities for people who did want to do some moving about.  If you've read any of my other entries on this blog you'll know that I believe that it can be appropriate to give children things which weren't designed to be toys so long as you're being realistic about health and safety. After some though I worked out what I was looking out for: an aerobics step. Designed to be strong, to take weight bouncing on and off it, not to slip on th...

This week we introduced the theme of Christmas in Creche and we all had a brilliant time- including the leaders!   As well as the slide, the see-saw, the step and the sparkly play dough we also put out... Wooden Nativity figures  Soft silver stars hand sewn and knitted by Catherine,  A selection of Nativity board books and a jigsaw mug trees to decorate with tree ornaments and rings Shaving foam snow! At snack time we read this great book that even the babies joined in with!  Click  here  to go to the Amazon link for this book The children especially loved the wooden animals from the nativity set and it just seemed appropriate, with the lovely silver stars to hand, to sing 'twinkle, twinkle little star'!

By Catherine Ward Creche at our church is a pretty relaxed affair.  We plan five minutes of structure; sitting down together with some fruit and a song or a story, and, if our song or story lends itself to it, we link some of the toys we get out with what we've chosen. Other than that our focus is on creating an enabling environment for the children to explore and play in. We like simple open-ended materials, sensory play and mark making, some opportunities for big movements, some natural things to investigate and some simple role play cues. And we like books, we like books a lot. We have a mixture of different sorts of books, some about God and some about his wonderful world, some about toddlers' day, some about the very hungry Caterpillar and some about Wibbly Pig.  I've written before about the Stories Jesus Told series by Nick Butterworth and Mick Inkpen and I've just recently found something equally fabulous. Susie Poole illustrates t...

As this Sunday was Harvest, we wanted to let even the youngest children experience something of the season!  Here's how we themed our activities in crèche to allow for exploration of God as creator. As well as our usual set up of things such as the see-saw and slide, we put out...  Play food (including our lovely new fabric food from IKEA!)  Hardy fresh food that children can touch and feel.  They even found that bashing coconuts with wooden spoons got a good sound!  Cold cooked spaghetti to feel (though this also was very tempting to eat!)  Board books about animals and nature Play dough in lids and seeds/ beans to stick into it.   We're going to keep a harvest theme for a few weeks, but vary what we put out.  We're also hoping to put together a harvest story bag to borrow.  More details to come!

By Catherine Ward We’re really lucky that we’ve got enough space to have rooms set aside for children’s work. We’ve been working on turning the crèche room into a really enabling environment for our under threes. It has taken quite some time, the whole church has just been reordered, and the old church offices (originally the rectory), now being transformed into our children’s centre, has been used as storage space. It’s been a job some weeks just getting the space safe for the children before a Sunday morning with all sorts of furniture stacked up in the corner. Finally though, the extra things have been cleared out and it’s feeling like we’re really getting somewhere. We’ve thought really carefully about what we want in the space and why and the first thing that was really important to us was comfy, adult-sized chairs. We’ve been left with the old clergy chairs out of the chancel. They’re not the most comfy things in the world, but they are big and with enough cushions you ca...

This Sunday in creche, the theme was God the Creator.  Here are some of the things Catherine put out for the children to explore and play with...  Toy farm Books about plants and animals Pictures of insects Discovery basket of natural items (including seeds in the bag!) Farm and creature jigsaws Fruit and vegetables with different textures to feel... We also sang one of our favourites- Bigger than Big!

This Sunday we looked at 'Great big God' and tried to get across some kind of the idea of God's bigness!  This involved playing with things that were 'big and small'.  So... Big balls and small balls big boxes and small boxes big balloons and small balloons Big jigsaw pieces and small jigsaw pieces This was fun! We ate grapes and raisins and then sang 'Great Big God' with all the actions- the children were highly amused at the sight of the adults dancing but tried to copy one or two of the actions!!

In our quest to make creche a place of exploration and discovery, we're always trying to find ways of giving the children some kind of different sensory experience.  I came across an idea similar to this on Pinterest and thought I'd give it a go, but with an unintentional twist! I found some ideas for making bean bags by pouring rice into balloons and tying off the ends.  After experimenting, I quickly realised that this would only work with big balloons!  At the pound shop (my favourite place!) the only big balloons available were the punch ball type with an elastic band tied at the end so we tried to make the beanbags with them.  It worked out brilliantly and the best thing was that they bounce as well.  One of the children at Sparklers this morning wouldn't put his down and all of the adults kept playing with them as well.  Definately worth while and only £2 to make 6!

This term in creche we are telling stories about Jesus.  We don't do anything incredibly formal but we do sit down for 5 minutes while we eat a snack and as we do so, we tell the children a story.  We try to base some of the activities we have on offer loosely around the theme of the story.  This is what we did this week... Our story was about the man who is lowered through the roof and is healed by Jesus. Tins with lids to take off and put on (taking off the roof!) Boxes with lids to scoop up and play with rice and lentils Mega blocks top build with.. ...or to put in the tins! A selection of mats, sleeping bag, blankets and cushions bandages and a toy doctor's kit We finished by singing 'Jesus love is very wonderful' and '3 little monkeys jumping on the bed' because the children love this song and now that Jesus had healed him, the man was able to jump up and down too!