"Who Speaks for Wolf?" puppet

The Spirit Play class heard and saw the "Who Speaks for Wolf?" story a couple of Sundays ago. It was a hit. At this congregation, environmental issues are felt very powerfully, and I have found that what the "Big Church" makes its priority and passion, so too will be felt by the young folks.

I got the template for this wolf at a French primary school's website that Google translates--preciously--to "a small corner of shares." With the particular puppet, we tried three different art media: markers (on the face), colored pencils (tail), and watercolors. We had two choices of brads--large gold ones, seen here, and small silver ones.

One special work choice that we had for this story was the making of wolf puppets. Two of the six children chose to work on these together. One nice thing about these particular puppets was that the pieces were moveable, so we could open up a discussion about how wolves--and dogs and coyotes and foxes--use their tails to communicate with each other; we could move the tail up and down to illustrate the idea. The story focused on the idea that caring humans need to take it upon themselves to speak for wildlife in matters of human affairs that will have an impact on the earth. But through this work choice we also could broaden the conversation to bring in the idea that animals often have sophisticated and nuanced ways of talking to each other.

Our second special work choice that, again, two of the six children chose, was working on a coloring page that had a stained-glass style picture of a wolf. It occurred to me that with themed coloring pages, and with our RE hour being just before service, it might be nice to have a few clipboards set up with these to color during service itself. 

Inventory night!

Heading into the second half of the year, I sat down with all our story baskets and did a good, thorough inventory. Lots of stories needed to be reunited with their texts. Some story pieces had broken pieces. Some needed refills of used materials. But all in all, we were in pretty good shape.

But you know, I'd almost have rather they be worn right out! I guess it's possible that the stories were played with everso gently by nimble-fingered children in dainty and unobtrusive ways. But my guess is they weren't taken off the shelves much. Next year, I want some serious smudges, nicks, bumps, and tears!

Who Speaks for Wolf?

Here's the layout for a new story that could be categorized as a 6th Source Story (earth-centered traditions) or a 7th Principle Story (respect for the interdependent web of all existence of which we are a part). I don't know that it would be right to classify it as a 3rd Source Story (world religions) because I am having trouble finding out if it is authentic to any one Native American tribe or region. This brought up a new issue for me, and that was looking at the Spirit Play story selection and presentation through an anti-racist, anti-oppression, and multicultural lens. That's new for me, so I don't have any fully formed ideas to share yet, just a notion that that habit would be helpful.

That said, here's the layout. The text of this story appears on the training CD

I have been messing around with the scroll saw a bit, and made this wolf figure to use instead of the suggested, though that one is quite nice and inexpensive. I like how my figure turned out a lot, but the scale is wrong with the people across the river (which come from the Powhotan people TOOB). That bothers me some. It seems as if it could be a distraction, and would inhibit acting out the story in a way that illustrates a more authentic interaction between humans and animals. (The resin toy suggested in the story is too big, too, so I think the whole layout would have to be reimagined to solve this problem.)

Also, one change I made from the suggested layout was to make the wolf's land look more lush and large than the people's. I think that helps drive home the point that the people coveted the wolf's territory, and that animals truly do need bigger and wider spaces than people do to live out their lives in a natural way.

I'll be interested to see how the children play with this set. It will be a good opportunity for me to focus on a practice that I was recently reminded of, and that is to carefully observe and record the children in their learning work and to make any needed changes to draw out the meaning and level of engagement.

Edited to add: The special work choice that we used for this story is here.

Play Silks!

I have wanted play silks for NINE years, since my oldest child was born. I was newly teaching at a little progressive school, and in searching out inspiration for classroom materials I stumbled into the Waldorf methods. You know where this is going. The soft, pastel wool. The nature tables. The solid wood. And of course, the flowing, brightly colored play silks. It's all so intoxicating, isn't it? Whether or not the method speaks to you, I have yet to meet someone who didn't fairly swoon at the set-up.

And truly, what they say about play silks is true. Kids do engage with them imaginatively, cleverly, and on many levels. They're great for kids with sensory needs. They're different from what most kids have at home, and so draw them in. And they're surprisingly durable. And for the Spirit Play classroom, they can be used

• in the church corner, as an altar play-thing;
• as dress-up clothes;
• as an underlay for certain stories; and
• as costume elements for skits.

But dang, are they expensive. It was one of those things where I always went to buy them, then said to myself, I can do that on my own for cheaper, then realized how much was involved in doing it for myself, then walked away to think about it another day. Nine years. Oy.

So, now motivated by making a set of silks for not only my own kids but the whole religious education program worth of kids, I did it!

Here's the process I used. I followed the instructions faithfully. If you don't feel like going to that link just yet, I'll tell you that the materials I needed were the plain white scarves, three primary color dyes, six mason jars, white vinegar, plastic measuring spoons, six wooden chopsticks, a big pot, and three small plastic cups.

Here are my jars a'boilin'.

And here are the silks. Aren't they yummy? The tie-dye effect was unintentional, and to tell truth, it works better on some of the silks than others. (Purple and peach it looks nice, green and yellow not so much, blue and pink I haven't decided.) But what happened was that I dyed large silks--30" ones--and they got bunched up a bit in the mason jars. I think next time, I'd either use bigger non-reactive containers for the large square scarves (such as half-gallon mason jars) or use the quart mason jars but make the dye a bit more concentrated and fill the jars higher with the solution. But this was my first time dying anything, so know that I'm offering my own trial-and-error methodology but no expertise.

So here is the breakdown of resources purchased. All materials were bought at Dharma Trading Co.

(6) 30" square silks for $4.85 each, totaling $29
acid dyes in primary colors of Caribbean blue, Deep magenta, and Sunflower yellow, totaling around $16
shipping was something like $8

That's $52 in materials. I had the big pot and the mason jars, but a 12-pack of mason jars cost about $12 if you had no glass or other non-reactive containers to work with. So we'll add that in and say we're up to $64.

It took me about 2 1/2 hours start to finish to make them.

So, for $64 and 2 1/2 hours, I got a nice set of silks to use for, naturally, open play in the Spirit Play classroom, but also for children's chapel altar decoration, as costume elements for the holiday pageant, and props and aids for games and other structured activities (the way bandanas are used in summer camps and youth cons and such).

 

Buying these online, I would have spent $96 or so, with six silks plus shipping. So right off the bat, that's a saving of $32. But it's still a rather expensive material, right? So here's what we can do. Make the materials stretch. You only use one tiny 1/2 tsp. of 2 oz. of dye. In other words, you have a ton left.

Ideas for the remainder of the dye:

Tie-dye church t-shirts that you all can wear to social justice and social witness events to represent your church.

Buy an extra set of scarves and dye them as teacher gifts (for about $5 per gift)

Gather some DRE friends and go in together on the dye materials and mason jars. With just one DRE friend, you can cut the total expenses by $18, so $46 for each of you rather than $64.

Set up all the materials yourself up at the church and invite congregants who want play silks at home to come and pay a small fee--maybe the price of the silk plus a few dollars. You could then show them how to use the silks for play and worship at home.

You could purchase extra silks or baby onesies or t-shirts to dye with the youth group and sell the finished products as a fundraiser. You could even get slightly fancy and stamp a chalice onto the garment using fabric ink or paint for a UU specific crowd.

Once we get these in the classroom and start using them, I'll post back again with pictures of specific uses.

Mustard Seed Medicine layout

Whew! Six months later, I've finally finished up the Mustard Seed Medicine story. First, here it is:

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.

I'm back! Baby boy and buying felt

Yay! I'm back to church after my summer furlough and maternity leave.

This was shortly before baby boy was born:

And here's baby boy a few days ago:

There. So now you are caught up! I've been back to work for two Sundays and was cheered to find that the Spirit Play classroom was clipping along with a schedule and activities that were working nicely. I hope this is the year that we can hold a retraining. My great hope is to present it to teachers and parents alike, pitching it as a classroom and homeschool/home worship method.

Meanwhile, I made use of a few JoAnns coupons and stocked up on underlay felt.

 This is something I have learned in the past year, to have on hand single yards of 72" recycled plastic felt--brand Ecofelt--in various colors, which JoAnn's sells for $4.99 a yard. Each yard yields 2 full 36" circular underlays, with ample scraps for other story elements. The neutral colors turned out to be the most useful, though the purple and dark blue are nice, too. Some of the bright colors that we thought we would end up color-coding with the rainbow Promise stories were just to hard to look at under the fluorescent lights of the classrooms, so we're moving away from that.

A story for home

Last fall, my two boys, 5 and 8, and I read Sophia Lyon Fahs' From Long Ago and Many Lands as our bedtime stories for a few weeks. We'd read one or two a night, sometimes doing the Judith Frediani questions at the end, sometimes not. Favorites emerged right away, but what surprised me was how a handful of stories really stuck with them; they'd bring them up months later, and correct each other on the specifics of their retellings.

One of those stories was "Mustard Seed Medicine." In it, a mother has a cherished and beloved son who, at the age of 4, dies. She brings the boy's body to the Buddha, who tells her that he knows the cure to her suffering. He tells her to go gather from her neighbors mustard seeds. The catch, though, is that the mustard seeds must come from a house where no one has been touched by death. In going through this exercise, the mother realizes the sad truth that no one--not one of her neighbor's lives--has not been touched by death in some way. It was not some mystical mustard seeds that brought her relief but the knowledge that this kind of terrible and deep sorrow is part of being human.

So, I began work today on some story pieces to make that story into a story basket for us to have here at home.

That's the mother figure on the left, then her young son, the Buddha, and one neighbor character.

I am learning how to do wood burning and paint on wood with watercolors, too, for this purpose. This was an early attempt.

I envision making a few little houses, too, to represent the neighbors' homes, and one house that opens to hold the Buddha and then the mother and son when they come to him.

Here's my idea of how to facilitate the going from house to house (using a house I had around, from "The Stranger's Gift" set).

In the Fahs version, the mother carries her dead son's body around, physically carrying out the mental anguish of not being able to "let go." I think this might best be represented with a two-sided figure of the son, one side (shown above) being featureless and washed out. My own children were most fascinated by the death of the child (and second most fascinated by the fact that none of the neighbors had not known death), so I really want a way for children to be able to work through that idea--living boy on one side, dead boy on the other, living boy on one side, dead boy on the other. And I plan to have a proper row of houses so the point can really be brought home that family after family after family confronts, deals with, and moves through the death of a loved one.