Flame: Creative Children's Ministry

For those of you who are looking ahead and planning for Ascension day then this is for you- but even if you're not, this is a great activity to help children think about giving their prayers to God!   This appears as one of the crafts in last month's Premier Youth and Children's Work magazine, which is amazing always worth a read :-) You will need: A plastic bottle or glass jar, water, vegetable oil, food colouring, Alka seltzer tablets Fill a bottle or jar halfway full with water and mix in some food colouring.  Now fill the rest of the bottle with oil, leaving a small space at the top.  The oil will separate from the water into a separate layer.  Drop an Alka Seltzer tablet (or try a quarter or half at a time if they are large tablets) into the bottle and watch as bubbles of coloured water start to ascend into the oil layer in the style of a mini lava lamp!   Talk: Watch the bubbles rising and thin...

Today we continued our look at the fruit of the Spirit in our school lunchtime club by looking at self control... We tried a game to start that involved marbles and cut up paper towel tubes.  Each child had a long u-shaped piece of tube.  Children stood in team lines and the idea was that they passed a marble from one end of the line to the other using only their piece of tube.  No one was allowed to touch their tube piece to another tube piece until they actually had possession of the marble!  If the marble fell it had to go back to the start of the line again.  We did this as a race between teams and it was hard but fun! After the game we used it to discuss the fact that they needed to try to keep the marble under control and, if they lost control of the marble, it had consequences for the whole team.  We compared this to keeping control of our emotions, especially anger, because it might hurt or affect us or other people if we didn't.   We ...

I came across this way of creating a piece of artwork the other day and I absolutely loved it!  Although not intended for that purpose, this activity really lends itself to thinking about protection and how God can look after us. It could be used with any story that involves a theme of protection and here is a way of using the art idea as a prayer activity... You will need: Bubble wrap with giant bubbles, fabric, felt, tissue paper, ribbon, wool, scissors or a craft knife. Unroll and spread out the bubble wrap so that a whole group of children can gather around it.  Before you start the craft, get an adult to cut a slit in the middle of each of the giant bubbles in the bubble wrap using scissors or a craft knife. This can be a bit fiddly, but it is worth it! Make sure that you only cut the back of each bubble, creating a pocket for the fabric to sit in.   Ask the children to fill each bubble with fabric, wool or tissue paper, u...

This is a lovely, peaceful yet colourful way to encourage children to be reflective and to pray for others. You will need: bubble mix containers and bubble wands, paper plates, food colouring (gel works fine for this!).  DO NOT try adding paint instead- the bubble mix ceases to work! Mix food colouring with the bubble mix- a different colour in each pot.  Experiment to find a level of colour that works for you.  The colours I have used are quite delicate, but you could go much bolder! Give each child a paper plate and ask children to think of the people they would like to pray for and ask God to bless them.   Spend a moment in silence thinking about them, then encourage the children to blow a set of bubbles onto their plate for each person they are praying for.  Wait for the bubbles to burst while you are praying for that person, then continue.   When the burst bubbles dry, the paper plate is a piece of prayer art work that the children can...

In an effort to help parents with ideas for connecting children with God at home, over the next few weeks, I'm hoping to get some prayer bags made up for each child.  For the 3-7s age group the activities are suitable for using as a whole family, each taking just a few minutes!   As we don't have massive groups of children, with a little organisation and outlay this is going to be possible!  The purchases I've made are: paper bags, plastic teaspoons, dice, small pots of playdough (4 pots for a pound in the pound shop), bubbles (9 for £1), party blowers (10 for £1), bags of pound shop lego (1 bag will supply about 4 children).  Everything else has been printed off and laminated! ·          Teaspoons (click  here  for teaspoon prayers explanation) ·          Prayer cube (click  here  to print off) ·          Die ·...