Big Bang/Beginning of the Universe

We had a snow day today, and with everything closed and the streets quiet, my mind turned to the long view of finishing out the year in the Spirit Play classroom.

A small unit that we'll be doing in late winter is creation, working within the "Wonder and Awe" Source of Unitarian Universalism, and moving from the scientific explanations of the start of everything to creation stories from various cultures. So today, I spent a little time using leftover materials and made the items for the "Big Bang/Beginning of the Universe" story.

Something I like a lot about this story is that there is a built in way for the children to co-create the story with the storyteller; at a certain point, the children crumple up gold tissue paper to demonstrate the compression of elements into stars. They then add the stars to the underlay as the story turns to the formation of galaxies. I have found myself soliciting participation in a couple of stories thus far, and have very much liked the effect it had on individuals and the energy of the group.

Chalica, Worship is the Center

Today is the first day of Chalica. It has never been celebrated at this congregation before, so a very dedicated and talented lay leader and I put it together from scratch. What fun! We selected "Worship is the Center" as the Spirit Play story to show the principles off at their very best--along with the chalice, sources, and rituals of UUism.

Here is the finished layout of that story, taken earlier in the day after I'd practiced it a few times:

The laundry basket is there for scale; this story, intended for sharing in a multigenerational worship setting, is big! Our gathered group of 30 was small enough that we could all still more or less circle around, but I'm curious how this would be best done in a group of 50 or more.

On the back of the symbols, I made little cheats for myself, writing the source that each symbol corresponded to, and a phrase or two about what that source offered to UUism. This was very helpful.

The cape--which I must admit I first thought of as a little cheesy--was a huge hit! People loved it. The gold circle above has a slit up to the center, and it's double-sided with the other side being black fabric with little silver stars on it. You begin the story wearing the cape with the "universe" side out, then you transform it to the underlay, then back into your cape at the end. I flubbed the ending of the story a little bit, going out with a little puff instead of the Big Bang that was written. But at 10 minutes of memorized text, this one pretty well tried me! 

It was the second time we used Spirit Play with the whole group, and universally, people adored it. They commented on the pace, the holiness, the way everyone around them was holding their breath anticipating the next part of the story. I was shocked. And happy. This RE year began with a handful of pressing and unanticipated needs, and so we were not able to launch Spirit Play the way we wanted to. But this felt like a very special introduction, and 30 people got to experience it. 

"The Weight of a Snowflake"

Children's Chapel for December is about peace and the power of one. The story I built for it was "The Weight of a Snowflake," which seems to be of ambiguous origin on the Internets. I took the short script, modified a few small details, and put it into a Spirit Play format.

It took me about half a week to make it from scratch, and I'd say about 9 hours (including planning the rest of the Children's Chapel around it). Nine hours of work for 45 minutes of time with the children, plus maybe another session here or there that uses the same materials in a different way made me second guess my time management skills. Not loving these stats, I made a really robust take-home sheet for families this week to bring the ideas home. And I'm referring them to the YouTube version of the story to listen to and watch together as a bedtime story.

I know in my bones that full-week faith is how children are going to move from doing UU to feeling UU, and that latter is what is going to help them to access--and add to--the wisdom, depth, and strength that UU has to offer. I'm still working on getting there.

A recording of the story I found on YouTube:

And the first sketch:

Building the pieces:

Then the story, in three stages:

And here's the whole thing packed up in its basket. I remembered to include in the script a sentence for each item as I'm putting it away, too, which is a nice chance to provide a little summary or add a bit of new information. 

Using this for Children's Chapel, I also presentied each child was a little end-of-year gift, a crochet wool snowflake (seen in the first image, and set in a little origami paper box). As I handed it to them, I had a little message for each one about having a unique, strong voice, and using it to add weight to the truths that are important. And for feast, we ate popcorn drizzled with white chocolate. Popcorn, in Spanish, is palomitas, which translates literally to "tiny doves."

Finally, here was the little altar setting for the children's service, with the story off to the right:

(The drums were our musical accompaniment for "Peace, Salaam, Shalom," which was our hymn.)

There were only a handful of kids there, but it was so lovely. One boy remarked how the tree reminded him of Ygrdasil, the Norse tree of life. Another asked me to tell her mom about the snowflake present so that she could be sure to remember it right. Afterward, when I was chatting informally with one boy's mother, he stood nearby and made a connection with what I was saying that began with, "It's just like in the story, about one voice." Their answers for the standard Spirit Play question, "I wonder where you are in this story?" were just beautiful--one child was the snow, for his favorite holiday of winter; another was the olive branch in the peace dove's mouth, where he thought the stories must come from; another was the trunk of the fir tree, strong and soft. 

It was such an honor to be there with them as they talked through their wonderings and knowings. Truly, it was one of those sessions that I think I would have spent twice as long on if I'd known how good it was going to be, so my resolution is to get smarter about time while keeping a very firm grasp on my priority of promoting incarnational spiritual growth.

Embroidery for Beginners

A quick share:

A small, child-friendly beginning embroidery kit that can be held in the lap during church service. Large, plastic tapestry needle. Embroidery floss wound neatly on cardboard spools. Round-tipped scissors. Big-holed burlap. Wee hoop. Basket just the size to sit in a child's lap. Two or three such kits (or more, for a bigger church) could be stacked together in the foyer or just outside the sanctuary in a specially designated area for kids to get and put back themselves.

Update:

Adults and children alike have fully embraced this during-service activity, and have even worked collaboratively on a design over several Sundays! The adults seem tickled that they are "allowed" to do this, too. A friend of mine, Joy, reminded me that there is good brain science that backs up the theory that having something creative and repetitive to do with one's hands helps some to focus. This can help some church leaders to be convinced of the fitness of this offering for our Sunday services.

Bread Communion story

Bread Communion is at the end of November, so we introduced the ritual in this month's first-Sunday Children's Chapel. The Spirit Play training CD that you get when you complete a training has a combination Church Corner/Bread Communion/Guests at Your Table story (Section 3, "Liturgical Lesson Bread Communion") that we modified for the occasion.

I used a fair amount of verbiage exactly as Beverly Leute Bruce wrote it, so I don't feel as if I can share our version of the story here. But I can share the picture!

The preparation for this story was particularly fun for me! I love watercolor on wood, and I love salt dough sculpture. As the materials-in-progress sat on my counter this past week, everyone who came over wanted to pick something up and look at it. I think of intrigue as one of the most powerful catalysts for learning, so this pleased me greatly. And with the whole thing coming it at under $5, it showed that the recommended high-quality materials for Spirit Play stories don't always--or even often!--have to mean high-dollar.

There's an option in the story, which we included, where you pass the smaller basket containing the people, and each child adds one him or herself around the central basket of bread. That was good. I want to look for more opportunities to unfold stories as a group.

For part of this story, too, you introduce the Guests at Your Table boxes and pass around a bowl of pennies for the kids to drop into the box, asking them to envision spreading help, food, and love as they do. They really got into this part! I don't remember how we introduced the boxes last year, but I feel great about this Spirit Play story as a kick-off, and think we'll be using it annually for the foreseeable future.

Serendipitously, I found these beautiful cut-and-fold paper trees, called "Thankful Trees," to accompany the boxes at our family dinner tables.  We had some on our Children's Chapel altar, too, and sent the cardstock print-outs home for each child to cut, fold, and display.

Autumn Leaf projects

Here are a couple of autumn leaf projects. They could tie in with a story, but since they are the literal background of life itself in areas with four seasons, they don't really need an introduction or occasion.

Still, these would be lovely art choices for a story on the turning of the Wheel of the Year. The Neo Pagan Holidays and Holy Days CD (available on Spiritplay.net) has a lovely Wheel of the Year story, and in a year-long study of the Pagan Sabbats, author Jessica Zebrine Gray recommends beginning on Samhaim.

Leaf rubbings, a fall classroom favorite. We used soy rock crayons, which have a great texture and shape for doing rubbings. They're pricey, but last a long time since they don't break or wear down flat like typical crayons.

And this one was new to me: making overlapping cray pas leaf silhouettes. This is done by holding the leaf flat against the paper whilst making little "ticks" of oil pastel color all around the edge. You then blend the oil pastel outward, still holding the leaf firm against the page, and when you lift it, get this nice crisp-edged negative space. Have you ever seen these, occurring naturally on the pavement beneath deciduous trees? It's a little ghostly, the twin remains of fallen leaves and rain.

This project was how we introduced the oil pastels as a new art material. This particular brand of cray pas had its own tray, which was nice; Crayolas don't, and they immediately get jumbled up and mark on each other.

Weaving with CD Looms

Here's a new work choice for the Spirit Play classroom or a quiet lap-activity to work on during service: CD loom weaving.

There is a good tutorial here, as well as many colorful examples using fun and funky yarn and colors. I included a selection of colors in each box and basket, each piece about 3 feet long, and a 3x5 card with brief instructions on the back.  (I forgot to include the round-tipped child scissors in the box pictured, but they'd go in, too, so that the kids would have everything they needed at the ready.)

Here is one way to write out the instructions:

  

• ·         Move the shuttle over, under, over, under the warp yarn, or the lines going out from the center of the circle.
• ·         When you want to change colors, cut the old yarn, leaving a little tail that you can tuck in later.
• ·         Then, tie the new yarn with a small knot to the next closest warp string. Tie the other end of the new yarn to   the back of the shuttle.
• ·         Continue in your over, under, over, under pattern.
• ·         When you finish, tie your last bit of yarn to the warp string.
• ·         Remember, there is no wrong way to do this. The learning is everything.
• ·         Keep your weaving, or donate it to the church to use as a glare interrupter to help songbirds not crash into our windows. Thanks!

 It would be great to have picture instructions, too, for pre-readers.

At first, I thought we might build up a stash of these that could be used as glare interrupters to help songbirds not fly into our windows. But I'll have to get a couple of samples up and view them from outside to see if they work that way. They're lovely as art pieces just the same, and could be an all-the-time work choice or could be a special work choice along with a Grandmother Spider story or with the book "Extra Yarn," which is about a little girl who has a never-ending supply of yarn that she uses to knit for all her friends, neighbors, and even enemies.

Lap Geoboards

Geoboards are another homeschooling favorite that translate well to the interactive, multi-modal, free-choice R.E. classroom (such as Spirit Play!), or even as a during-service, quiet, independent activity for younger children.

We'll likely use them as the latter in our church, because that is where there is the greatest present need for some creativity.

These were super easy to make. Took me about four hours total, from store shopping to finished product.

Here are the supplies for making a set of 4:

(4) 7x9 inch blank pine plaque, $2-3 each
pushpins, $3-4 for a pack of 200
30-pack of colorful, no-snag hair elastics, $3-4

I looked up a one-inch grid online, then put a blank piece of paper onto my computer screen and made dots on the paper, enough to fit on my plaque.

I laid the piece of paper over my plaque and felt around the edges, trying to get the dots pretty well centered on the plaque. With a wee bit of ease around the edges, I ended up with 6 by 8 one-inch dots.

Once the dot paper was well positioned, I took one pushpin and pushed through the paper and a little bit into the wood, which made the marks exactly where they needed to be. I did this for all the dots, being careful not to shift the paper. (You could also actually push in a pin or two at the corners to be sure your paper won't slip.)

Then, I took off the paper and pushed individual pins in by hand where I saw the marks. I will admit, my thumb got pretty sore! That's a lot of pins by your 3rd or 4th geoboard. Some pins were harder than others to push in (especially those around a knot in the wood), so I used a hammer to come afterward and gently tap all of them down flush. You have to be careful, though, because I got a little carried away with one and broke the plastic off the top of the pin, and it was a doozy getting that sucker pried back up with a butter knife. So gentle as it goes with the hammer.

My hope is to put the geoboard and a set of six or so colored bands in small baskets that kids could take as they enter the sanctuary and then have in their laps during service. I can see some potential pitfalls here--if kids tried to pry up the pushpins (very hard to do, but possible) and if kids used the geoboards like slingshots to zip the elastics all over (which was the second thing my kids did with them, after making pictures of swords). But, like anything else, we'll assume the best and most creative use of the materials, help the kids understand how to act in ways that are kind to those around them while sharing a space, and be patient as they learn and grow.

Abraham and Ishmael

I did it! I wrote my first Spirit Play story, and told it today!

It went really, really well. It was risky. It was the story of Abraham and Ishmael, told as part of a Children's Chapel service about the Muslim holiday Eid al-Adha, which occurs in a week and a half.

It's a tough story for some UU's to sit with. There's Abraham, a key dude in the Bible, Torah, and Quaran. There's God, the angry Father in heaven. And there's that part about Abraham unquestioningly agreeing to murder his son since God told him to.

Some UU's strain mightily to find the wisdom in stories such as this one from our Jewish and Christian heritage. But that's something I like a lot about Spirit Play. Spirit Play works with stories. All stories are true. They are true stories. "Once upon a time..." "As the story goes..." "And they say..." There is an acceptance of the validity of the genre that allows us to hear the truth of a story and hold it in a different--but no less important--place than the truth of physics or geological time or cell biology.

No one at a UU church is asking anyone else to swallow the truth of a story whole. We are hearing and feeling and thinking about the story together. We are wondering about it together. We co-create a place that is safe to explore, where our questions are taken seriously and appreciated, and where we share what truths we discern for ourselves as we muddle through this beautiful business called Life.

So today, eleven children and I examined this story--the inspiration for one of the two official holidays of the 2nd largest religion of the world--to see what we could see.

Here's the story:

Spirit Play Story

“Abraham and the Sacrifice”

Materials:

White underlay, 36” square

2 peg people, one large and one small

4 strips contrasting, natural-colored, textured fabric (to represent 3-day voyage up mountain plus one strip laid horizontally at the top)

Brown textured fabric cut into oval about 6” long

Ram cut out of felt or sewn

Shrub cut out of felt or sewn

[Spread out white underlay. Lay the three fabric strips going up in a rough stair-step like a mountain, with the fourth one laying flat across the top as the top of your mountain where the sacrifice will take place.]

As the story goes, Abraham had two sons, Ishmael and Isaac.

[Set Abraham at bottom of mountain.]

This story is about only one of his sons. Jewish and Christian people believe this story is about Isaac. Muslim people believe the exact same story is about Ishmael. It’s the same story, but a different son, depending on who’s telling the story.

Today, I’m going to tell the story with Ishmael and Abraham, because this is the Muslim story.

[Place Ishmael on overlay next to Abraham]

Abraham loved his God and trusted Him and believed that He was always good and right.

One day, God told Abraham to take his son Ishmael up to the top of the mountain and kill him. God told Abraham this would please Him.

Abraham was confused, and worried. He loved his son and didn’t want to hurt him. But he also trusted God and believed that everything God said and did was right. He chose to obey God.

Abraham and Ishmael went up the mountain. Abraham carried a knife, and Ishmael carried a bundle of wood.

[Move characters up the mountain. Roll up the wood bundle so that Ishmael can “carry” it. At the top, place the pile of wood next to the shrub.]

When they reached the top of the mountain, Abraham tied Ishmael up, laid him on the pile of wood, and held the knife over him. Just then, an angel appeared to Abraham and told him to stop. The angel said God didn’t want Abraham to sacrifice Ishmael after all, but wanted him to sacrifice a ram instead. At that moment, Abraham noticed a ram—a male sheep—who was tangled in a bramble bush nearby.

[Place shrub next to pile of wood. Place ram in shrub.]

Abraham untied Ishmael. He caught the ram, and sacrificed the ram instead.

[Move Ishmael from pile of wood and next to Abraham. Move ram into pile of wood.]

The son Ishmael lived a long time, and became an important prophet of the Muslim people.

Wondering questions:

I wonder what about this story surprised you?

I wonder how Ishmael felt when he heard Abraham’s plan to sacrifice him?

I wonder if Abraham thought about refusing God’s order that he kill his son?

I wonder why the ram needed to be sacrificed at the end of the story?

I wonder why this story is important to the Muslim people?

***

One child added, "I wondered why God changed his mind. Or maybe the angel wasn't right about God changing his mind?"  Another chimed in and wondered why God didn't just say the ram to begin with, since he was God and all.

Because we didn't do this story in the Spirit Play classroom, but rather used the Spirit Play method of storytelling in a Children's Chapel service, I opened and closed with some information about Eid al-Adha. Here was my closing text, which we followed with a "feast" of dried dates:

The Muslim holiday of Eid al-Adha celebrates this story in several ways. First, families and neighbors and friends get together to pray to God. Muslims pray five time a day, every day. Muslims also give to charity on this day. In honor of the sacrifice of the ram, it is a Muslim tradition for a farmer to slaughter one of his or her animals and give 1/3 of the meat to the poor, 1/3 of the meat to friends and neighbors, and keep 1/3 of the meat for his or her own family. In the United States, there are not that many Muslims who are farmers. So instead, many Muslims give food to a food bank, contribute money to an animal rescue (maybe if they are vegetarians), or find another way to give to charity. Giving to charity is very important to Muslims. Muslim families also feast together on Eid al-Adha. A traditional Muslim feast food is dates. Have you ever had a date before? That is our feast today.

 

Wonder Box paper lotus

I watched a good video a while back of a workshop given at General Assembly this year called "Wonderbox: Integrated, Meaningful Time for All Ages." The presenter was Rev. Christina Leone (from my birth town of Annapolis, MD!). (I'll post the link below; it's an hour long, but very worth a watch.) The concept of her Time for All Ages idea draws much from Spirit Play (which she mentions herself in the presentation), and seems like a good fit for our congregation. We're trying it for the first time this Sunday.

The Story for All Ages this week is the parable of the Buddha and the flower:

Who can help me with the Wonder Box today? Anyone willing to open it and see what’s inside?

Ah, I see we have a flower. This is a folded paper flower, maybe a folded paper lotus. This isn’t the only lotus in this room. Can anyone else see another?

Today’s Time for All Ages story is about the Buddha, Sidhartha Gautama, and his “Flower Sermon.”

The story goes that one day, the Buddha was scheduled to speak before thousands of his disciples. They were all gathered waiting for him, waiting to receive his wisdom.

The Buddha entered. Maybe a hush fell over the crowd. But the Buddha…said nothing. He said nothing, but he held out a flower. He looked at the flower. The disciples…didn’t know what to do.

One delivered a lecture on the meaning of the flower.

One composed a poem about the flower and recited it.

One shared a parable on what the flower could symbolize.

Still, the Buddha stayed silent, and simply…looked.

Finally, the disciple Mahakashyapa looked. He was also silent. And then, he smiled.

The Buddha handed Mahakashyapa the flower, and he said to his followers, “What could be said, I have said to you. And what could not be said, but what had to be known wordlessly, for one’s own self, I have given to Mahakashyapa.”

And our Wonder Box item is a paper lotus, made using these directions:

We don't have a dedicated Wonder Box yet, but that will be fun little thrift store trip in the next couple of days.