Flame: Creative Children's Ministry

This summer I'm finally getting round to decorating and sorting one of the rooms that we use on a Sunday.  It's been a work in progress over the past few months! To help with the decorating efforts, I made some bunting to hang with words that describe God on each piece.  We got the children on Sunday to think of words and then I added them to the bunting as a temporary measure.  Hopefully, after summer, when more of the children are around, we can get them to decorate it properly! Words the children chose are:  faithful, patient, Lord, great, light, strong, love, king, caring, kind, big, awesome, amazing, eternal, clever, un- sinful, good, powerful, always in control.  It's great to have the words hanging as a constant reminder of words to praise God with!  The bunting itself took minutes to make.  I cut some triangles out of foam sheets and stapled them to a long string of ric rac braid.  I then wrote the words on with a permanent mar...

We've had our prayer board  up for at least a year and a half now, so it's time to have a little change round!  The knowledge that God listens to us and answers our prayers is fundamental to what we are teaching the children, though, so we want to make sure that, whatever replaces it gives the children the chance to celebrate answered prayer. This is our new board... I found some garden netting at Asda (£1 for A LOT!) and stapled some of it over some shiny blue fabric Children can write or draw their prayers on paper slips and poke them through the netting as a symbol of putting them into God's hands (He can hold the prayers as in a net).  Then, when the prayers have been answered, children can unroll them and pin them to a washing line next to the board.  I'm just hoping that no one manages to pull hard enough on the next to dislodge all my staples!!

We're trying to build up a sense of belonging to a group amongst the children in Sparks.  As the children come from homes spread right across the city and are not likely to meet up outside of church, we want them to feel welcome and amongst friends when they come to their group on a Sunday morning.  Part of this involves giving them space to play and explore together during the session but another part relies on their physical surroundings.  We want the Sparks room to be a welcoming, friendly place to be! One thing that has been introduced to help them feel that it is their place is the 'Hello board'.  This is a peg board for name cards.  When children arrive they can find their name card (helped by pictures if they aren't reading yet) and peg it to the board.  We can then use this as a starting point to gather together at the start of the session, see who's here and share the news of the week.  It seems something very simple, but it helps to bu...