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Particulars:
The story is made from wood and felt. The figures are cut from 3/4 inch pine board, and the Buddha's house is cut from a 3/4 inch by 3/4 inch piece of oak. Painted with water colors, wood-burned features, and Mod Podge sealer.
The houses are just two felt rectangles with the top one having a door-shaped rectangle cut out, and then the two layers stitched all around. (They likely could have been glued for a no-sew option, but I like the look of sewing.) I worked with the house design a lot, but it seemed as if the more clever and engaging I tried to get with the house designs, the more distracting they were from the characters and the flow of the story. Simple and repetitive was definitely the way to go. Still, something nice about these houses is that you can tuck the figures into them, so in that house in the upper left, you can keep the green neighbor in the house until the mother comes to ask for the mustard seed, and then have the neighbor come out the door to talk.
This story is written up beautifully on the Spirit Play training CD, and this layout works well with that text.
Tools and Supplies:
This presentation was pretty tools-intensive. I used a scroll saw, a Dremel tool, a sewing machine, sandpaper and a big set of watercolor paints. Supplies, however, were cheap. The full pine board was $9 for, I think, 10" by 8'? The 3/4" oak piece was 7' long and was about $7. I used probably 20% of both of the quantities of wood, so let's call that $3. The felt was $5/yard, and the quantities I needed to buy in order to get the big white shape meant 1 1/2 yards total of fabric. I used my handy-dandy 40% off coupon from JoAnn's, so that was maybe $3.50.
If you didn't have tools available to you, you could glue or hand-stitch the houses, use wooden peg people (simply painted in muted colors would be nice), and use long, thin felt pieces for Buddha's open-sided house. That would keep the story still under $10.
As usual I love it. What gorgeous and seductive materials they are. What I do hope people appreciate in your growing collection of materials and then seek to bring to their own Spirit Play collections- and that is a consistent style among your materials. This makes the room appear less cluttered, and more deliberately appointed. For the children it is surely supporting their self discipline or focus as lessons are presented, it supports their ability to easily interpret how materials are used since there is a look to buildings, people, and so on that are each being represented in a consistent manner- even though not with the identical shaped piece the people will always be done in a similar way etc. When things are cobbled together without critical editing and reworking to achieve this sort of harmony between the look of all the lessons it introduces an unnecessary obstacle at the start of each lesson as the children adjust to the peculiar set of representational objects which needs to happen for them to enter the story. It could be likened to the way that children have to test and regain their own sense of assurance about expected behaviors and responses to those behaviors when in a traditional Sunday school class and the teachers seem to change weekly. You are also demonstrating for us how this can be accomplished without breaking the bank.
ReplyDeleteI also wanted to share that with this lesson the worship woodwork pieces where never done quite the way I planned and designed them as they where to be stuffed fabric pieces (not dolls though). I also later started presenting it including the name of the mother which was Kisa Gatomi and her piece could be flipped at the end of the lesson showing her with a halo just like the Buddha piece had.