Godly Play Online: The Circle of the Church Year
The video for this week’s Godly Play lesson is The Circle of the Church Year, from Jerome Berryman’s,The Complete Guide to Godly Play, Volume 2. The story is told by Godly Play Canada Trainer, Lindsay Bradford-Ewart.
The focus of this week’s story is how the church tells time. Each year, the Christian people move through a circle of memory and expectation to open themselves to the elusive presence of God. In the Godly Play classroom, we pay attention to this circle of movement each week, as we mark the movement on the large wall hanging of the Circle of the Church Year, and like in the church, we change the underlay under the Holy Family on the focal shelf, to mark the season we are in.
The Circle of the Church Year presentation set is a wooden circle. Wooden blocks fit in a ring to mark each week of the liturgical year. Three arrow-shaped hands of this “clock” point to the three great times of the Church year: Christmas, Easter and Pentecost.
After the wondering questions, again, while we encourage children to choose their own work in the Godly Play room, if you wanted a more structured suggestion, perhaps your child could create their own Circle of the church year?
Ways to do that might be:
1. To use a paper plate or a circle of paper, and using crayons, markers or paint, to mark first the 3 great times (Christmas, Easter and Pentecost) and then adding the times to get ready for those great Mysteries:Advent- 4 weeks and Lent – 6 weeks, and then the Easter Season – 6 weeks. All the other weeks are the “great green growing weeks”.
2. If you have coloured beads available, you could make a necklace with the beads using white, green, blue, purple and red
3. If you have playdough in some of the colours, your child could play with that – maybe choosing the colour she liked best, or the colour he thought most important…
4. Your child could find pictures in magazines in the colours and cut and glue those to a sheet of paper….
I hope your family enjoys the lesson.