just a simple glimpse will keep you simply standing there
Godly Play was so much better today!
I spent a good chunk of yesterday afternoon practicing the Creation story at Dennis' place while he was at work. So, this morning, I rolled out my black felt and said, "in the beginning there was...not very much," except, you know, a bunch of white cat hair from Madame Clyde, who was being helpful while I was rehearsing. The kids didn't notice, fortunately. Note to self: check to see if felt needs to be lint-rollered before class starts.
My friend Maggie*, who put together the Godly Play program for St. Ned's, sat in today to help me out if needed. She is very pregnant, since her due date is two weeks away, and one of the kids was very concerned that the baby doesn't have a name yet, at least not publicly. He wanted us to immediately start making lists of possible baby names since Maggie seemed to have overlooked this vital step. Which is still better than the very small child who wanted to pull up Maggie's dress during the children's sermon last week, to see where the baby was.
My doorperson today was Jane. I love Jane. She's one of the two grandmothers on my folding team - every week they come in on Friday morning and fold all the bulletins. I didn't have the main one finished in time this week (the less said about that...) so I had to fold 250 of them myself on Friday afternoon. I now double-super-appreciate Jane and Gretchen and their faithful service. Also, they crack me up. One day, they started singing Proud Mary for no good reason. They're both Godly Play door monitors and Jane works in my room. She did stretches with the kids outside the door before class started, just to get a bit of their extra energy out, which helped a lot.
The door monitor is basically the other adult in the room. She helps with getting the kids into the room so they can join the circle at the beginning, and then helps out during response time, while the kids are doing artwork or working with the story materials, and during the feast she helps the kids serve the drinks and snacks. It's a slightly less intense job than storyteller, just because they don't have to memorize anything ahead of time.
I had 5 kids today instead of 8, which made things easier. There were still interruptions during the story, but not as many as last week and the kids weren't as intent on playing with the materials while I was telling the story. I think it really helped that I talked about the day's schedule, and what I expected, before I dove in. They must have been listening, because I talked about getting a rug out of the basket to define a workspace during response time, and when response time came around...they all did it. They went and got rugs and worked on the rugs! After last week, this feels like a huge triumph! Cause and effect!
Maggie had to take one child out for a few minutes, but he came back in and handled the rest of the time pretty well. I really like him; he's one of my two Asperger's Syndrome boys, so it's harder for him to stay with the program and not be disruptive, but I'm glad he's there. I pulled him aside today during response time (there was a Situation developing over the church year puzzle) and asked him to tell me about the Ten Commandments. He unpacked the tablets from their little box and told me what they meant. He has this TV Preacher voice that he uses when he's talking about God, and he uses a lot of biblical language. God is very alive to him.
Next week is going to be fun - we're doing Noah and the Flood, which uses our beautiful arks. One of the other parishioners made an elaborate wooden ark for each of the four classrooms, complete with jigsaw-cut animals and a little gangplank for them to go up and down. I think he also put a little kid-magnet in the bottom of it, because it's often the first thing that gets taken off the shelf during response time. It's a really seductive object.
Someone else is rotating in as storyteller after next week...it's going to be really hard to let go, even for just the few weeks until I'm back on again.
[* For reasons I can't actually explain, I feel weird identifying St. Ned's people by name, so I'm making up really lame pseudonyms, at least until they tell me it's ok!]
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