Training Day

Kris has been a UU religious education teacher for 12 years. She's tried several different UU curricula, and was learning Spirit Play for the first time. The story she told us was "The Flaming Chalice," and is among the first lessons in the Spirit Play classroom.

Participants followed the telling of the story (or in this case, lesson) with "work" of their choice, which often takes the form of an art response. Holly chose to paint. The paints were set up so that she had everything she needed to work independently, without having to ask an adult to help her gather materials or find a space to work.

Painting was a popular choice for work time at our training; here are several responses to "The Flaming Chalice" story. The children are free to respond directly to the story or not, but here all the adults incorporated elements from the lesson that was previously shared.

Also during work time, Carol and Michelle play with two different stories. The stories are often held in baskets, but are sometimes kept in wooden boxes or plastic bins. In an actual Spirit Play classroom, the children would not be able to choose stories that they had not yet been told. (And in fact, these stories would not yet be on the shelf.) But for the purpose of our training, we were free to experiment with several different stories.

April chose stringing beads for her work, and made herself a bracelet. She finished on time, but as a child in the class, had she not, we could have put her work in a pouch or pocket for her to pick up the following week to continue. Notice here the plastic bins containing stories; our trainer told us that some churches label stories and others do not.

Joy laid out a story whose name I forgot, but its subject was UU roots and "promises," or Principles. It was a longer story at about 15 minutes, and had many pieces and a lot of text to remember. Jennifer Innis is pictured on the right.