From: Suki
Date: Wed Jul 19 16:07:33 MST 2006
Subject: KidVespers Clarification

As we reconfigure our ways of working with the Village children on Sunday nights, I thought I'd post a blog to communicate what's happening. In the past, we've been pretty random about this. We had been wary about using most church curriculi that we'd seen for various reasons. Sometimes the overall philosophy was not something we wanted to teach our kids, sometimes it was very old fashioned or just bad theology. So we went with trying to create it off the cuff for ourselves. Unfortunately, that ended up with sometimes offering them nothing at all save a hearty time of play. We believe that it is primarily the parents' responsibility to train their children up in godliness (with a lot of help & interaction from the community), so in keeping with this, we have recently shifted to the Village parents meeting to decide on a more clear direction for teaching the kids. Also in keeping with this, the parents are taking on more responsibility for doing the main planning & teaching. There are currently 10 parents who are in a 10-week rotation for teaching. We have begun a modified use of a Montessori-type curriculum called "Godly Play". It has a strong emphasis on telling biblical stories and allowing children freedom within a set structure. So if you hear the words "Godly Play", it's not about a drama thing we have going on or a game that's being invented -- it's the new setup for KidVespers. There's a website at www.godlyplay.com if you want to take a look at the general idea of it. We still want to hang onto the good parts of our old system, however. Namely, over the past few years we've had a lot of people other than parents who have been generous with their time & energy by spending time with the children during Vespers. This has been really valuable in communicating to them that they're an important part of our Village and in providing a space for them to get to know & be known by & play with (develop healthy relationships with)the other adults. So we still want non-parents to be in the KidVespers rotation! We have called the non-parent person 'the enforcer', which may have both beneficial and non-beneficial implications. This team person does help to establish the structure by leading the children into the classroom and helping the kids to pay attention during the storytime. But the nonparent is also there to interact with the kids and help them, especially during craft/playtime/sharing time/snack. So we may need a title that reflects more of these facets. The idea is still for this auxilliary teammate to participate in planning by being in contact with the parent during the week before their scheduled time and to be engaged with the children during KidVespers... I'm not sure if we've managed to convey that as we have talked about the changes we're pursueing. Finally, the meeting at the Cromers this Friday night is a chance for anyone who's interested in learning more about the 'Godly Play' concept/curriculum and how we might be able to utilize it in our context. They've invited a friend down from Phoenix (I think) who has had a few years' experience using this curriculum in his church to come talk to us about it.

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