Our story this week is based on Luke 2:1-7 and Matthew 1:25.

Mikey has really engaged with the repeated sentences about the baby and the “Jesus – God to the rescue!” phrase. They’re key to the message so we’ve decided to repeat them each week.

Mary and Joseph walked and walked and walked and walked (sigh!) to Bethlehem.

Mary had her baby. A special baby. God’s baby.

Joseph said, “his name is Jesus – God to the rescue!”

Short but sweet is working for us. Obviously there is lots we’ve missed. I’ve tried to include only things I think the boys will have a chance of understanding and I don’t want to distract their attention by making it too long or by telling them non-essential information. But what do you think? What would you keep and what would you leave out when retelling the Christmas story to your kids?

The tiredness of the early weeks of pregnancy really scuppered my plans for lots of 1 Peter teaching for the boys! Yes, lack of posting reflects the lack of playing on the word with the lads. Not great, but that’s real life!

It’s December already, which gives us a good opportunity to start something new! I’m 13 weeks pregnant now, so the exhaustion is beginning to lift – phew!  There are tonnes of different advent teaching activities out there, but we’ve decided to do our own thing to make it as useful as possible for our boys. We’ve decided just to focus on the Christmas story and do one thing each week: Mary and the angel, Jesus is born, the shepherds, the wise men.

Mikey especially thrives on routine and repetition (what small child doesn’t?!) so doing exactly the same story for a whole week is great for him. We’ve rewritten it to include simple language – using words and actions that we know the boys like joining in with and we’ve kept it really, really short! We’re using our nativity set instead of pictures and will add new characters each week.

Here’s our story for this week, based on Luke 1:26-38.

Mary was surprised when she saw an angel in her house!

“Don’t worry!” said the angel, “God has exciting news especially for you!”

“For me?! No!” Said Mary with a smile.

“Yes! For you! God says you will have a baby. A special baby. God’s baby! Call him Jesus – ‘God to the rescue’!”

“Wow!” said Mary, “that’s amazing!”

As usual we finish with a prayer and today we had a little bit of cheering too!

We’ve also got an advent calendar and a set of boxes which I’ll fill with chocolate and we can open at tea time. So for the rest of the week we’re thinking about play linked to the coming of Jesus. Big themes I think we’ll focus on: waiting, rescue, excitement, surprise!

Well I think the process I’m going through with the boys is this:

What belongs to you? → You belong to me → We belong to God

• So, “what belongs to you?” play:

Matching items to Dan and Mikey – use stickers with the boys pictures and names (ones I made are shown above!) to mark their possessions: cups, shoes, toys, clothes, car seats, highchair, etc.

Getting mixed up! Wear the wrong clothes (ie Mikey in Dan’s), sit in the wrong chair – most effective if me and Dave do it too and make it very silly.

SAY: “The cup belongs to Mikey”, “This teddy is yours, Dan”, “This shoe isn’t mine! This shoe belongs to Mikey!”

• “You belong to me” play:

Get a family picture or pictures of each of us individually and play a jigsaw game – main aim is to stick a picture of Mikey and Dan on me and Dave.

Could also use pictures of other children to help them see that they don’t belong to us?

Lots of hugs, kisses and hoorays at belonging – really show how special and fabulous it is to belong.

SAY:

“Who belongs to mummy? Dan does!!”, “Mikey, you belong to me!”

• “We belong to God” play:

Carry on from the previous bit of play and one by one stick pictures from the family jigsaw onto the word “God”.

Again, lots of hugs, kisses and hoorays at belonging!

SAY: “We belong to God”, “Mikey belongs to God”, “you belong to God” – “wowee!!!”

1 Peter sounded like a great idea until I sat down to read it to work out how to teach it to the boys!! It’s been brain-stretching so far, but exciting to feel that it is possible.

How about I share some of my thinking and the play I’ve been planning for this week?

I start off by writing out the passage (1 Peter 1:1-2). It’s NIV which is the Bible I have for personal reading. I’m a scribbler, so it works for me to get things down on paper.

There were bits I didn’t really understand (this often happens to me!) so I also checked out ESV and NLT and also chatted it through with Dave. I’m really trying to understand the passage for myself before I even think about how and what I’m going to teach the boys.

Once I feel it’s clear in my head I start thinking about how I can work out the main point I want to teach the boys.

The main focus of the passage seems to be who the readers are because of God’s work through Jesus: elect, strangers, scattered, chosen, sanctified, sprinkled. These qualities can give them amazing confidence and security in their uncertain circumstances (scattered strangers). The phrase ‘elect exiles’ in the ESV makes me think of Daniel in Babylon and the challenge to him to remain faithful and trusting that God was with him – the Christians reading Peter’s letter were facing the same thing.

But am I going to teach that to my boys?! Well, not yet – this is obvious but it needs to be said – there is no point teaching things the boys won’t understand. I think we sometimes feel like the Bible is magic and that simply by earnestly teaching everything it will somehow transform our children. The Bible is powerful but there can be no expectation that my children will understand a biblical concept that they can’t grasp in the rest of life!

So what am I going to go for here? Well the idea of being chosen/elect seems to run through the passage – that is why they’re strangers in the world, that is why they’re secure. I’m going to go for that I think.

But the concept of being “chosen” by God is hard. There are plenty of great play ideas you could do with the kids but what would you say to support the teaching? I don’t feel I can say “God chose you”, because although I pray he has, I simply can’t assume it! Saying “God chose me/mummy” is just too smug and also abstract for the boys to grasp. I’m certainly not going to add words and make it even more impersonal and dry by saying “Christians are chosen by God”… true as it is, they’d be begging for nap time!

So why not change the word but keep the sense of it and talk about “belonging”?

• Theologically it is true that we all belong to God, so I feel comfortable talking about the boys belonging to God.
• It fits with the message of the passage. Belonging could be swapped for “chosen/elect” and the meaning could remain.

So…
We’re going to do some lovely play about belonging and I’ll post play ideas tomorrow!

One of the new things for us is having one teaching group for all the children in the church family. I estimate that there are about 10 kids from 2-13 in the group at the moment (not including the wee babies!). It’s a challenge to engage and usefully teach those kids isn’t it?

Having chatted to Dave I feel convinced of a couple of things:

• simple is going to be best here. Even the oldest kid can glean useful stuff from simple, faithful teaching done well. It’s reassuring to remember that these young people may well stay in church all their lives – this isn’t their one chance at each book and topic we go for.

• this is where parents’ responsibility to teach their children comes in to its own. The sunday club teachers are going to be doing a great job, but their teaching won’t be exhaustive – there will be things missing, things that were too tricky for one kid or too basic for another. We easily rely on sundays to be our children’s big Bible meal, whereas it should be a tasty snack on top of all that we’ve been doing with them through the week. It may well be more memorable for the child but it is unlikely to be as significant and crucial as the day by day, along the road teaching from parent to child that happens at home.

In Sunday club the leaders are following what the adults are doing – this term it’s 1 Peter. I think this is exciting because it will really help us as parents to be better equipped to teach our kids and consolidate and follow up what happens on a sunday. It also challenges the sunday club leaders to be simple – which is pretty tricky with a letter, I think.

I’m going to continue to prepare stuff for Jennifer, who is sticking with Mikey inspite of our change of congregation. I’ll be giving updates of how on earth we teach 1 Peter to preschoolers through play! My brain is being stretched and I’m praying my all too cold heart will be warmed.

This week I’m going along with the main point that the sunday club leaders are doing – Jesus is happy that Mary listened to him.

We’ve done a few bits of play involving listening – just little things to make the boys laugh, like hiding and making noises and jumping out at them when I know they’ve listened and heard. Mikey really enjoys it when I whisper things in his ear and giggles when I whisper, “I love you, I love you” over and over again! Also when the boys have been playing and paying attention to what I say I’ve given them lots of praise for listening well. But these have been fairly incidental bits of play.

The main thing we’ve done at home to help reinforce this message is laid it on really thick when we do family Bible time. We’ve said “let’s listen to Jesus” a lot before we read the boys’ Bible book and given lots of praise and encouragement at the end for how well they’ve listened and used phrases like, “Jesus loves it when we listen to him!” and, “listening to Jesus is really important”, “I like listening to Jesus”. The reason for focussing on this area is that this is surely the application of the passage for us now – the way we listen to Jesus today is by paying attention to his word, the Bible.

It challenged me actually. Family Bible time is something we do everyday. We say thank you for God’s book when we say thank you for the food and one of us reads while the boys have their breakfast, whoever read also prays a quick response to the passage. But being challenged to listen – well, it showed me how easily it’s just become part of the routine and not a special and exciting time. I’ve enjoyed really ‘bigging up’ Bible time and think we should think about ways to make it more of a precious time and perhaps help the boys focus, to see it as something important and different to the rest of the day. How you do this when it’s hard enough to keep them in one place I don’t know!! Perhaps we should just be glad the routine is there and think about building on it more a little further down the line!

But that’s us so far on listening to Jesus.

Do you do Bible time with your kids? Have you got any ideas for me?!

ps the picture has nothing really to do with today’s post, it just made me laugh – Mikey’s quite into pretending at the moment – quite convincing I think.

I’ve just written out the passage, stuck it on the fridge and underlined things I think are the big ideas. The main point sunday club are going for is “Jesus was pleased that Mary listened to him”, which sounds pretty great to me.

I’ll let you know my plans for some word-play once I make some!

We’ve been doing Zacchaeus play this week, in preparation for Sunday club. I had a think about it at the weekend and stuck the passage (Luke 19:1-10) on the fridge to act as a reminder.

The main point the sunday club group are focussing on in their ‘friends of Jesus’ series is that Zacchaeus changes when he becomes Jesus’ friend … I had no ideas really about how to show that point through play! I asked Dave and he made some suggestions but agreed with me that for Mikey and Dan it’d be clearer to focus on verse 10 which says

For the Son of Man came to seek and to save what was lost.

It seems to be the big thing we learn about Jesus in the passage. It’s pretty amazing isn’t it?!! The total transformation we see in Zacchaeus shows how well Jesus does his job.

So our play focussed on seeking and saving/finding the lost!

There are loads of things you could do for this. We hid finger puppets under scarves and searched until we found them, I hid things in bags, we played a lot of hide and seek – for the boys that works best just dashing round the corner and saying things like, “where’s Dan? Dan is lost! I’ve lost Dan! Where’s Dan? I’m going to look for Dan, I hope I find him!”.

Mikey’s also really keen on hiding under blankets and he loves being found!

I’m planning to also try out burying some things in a box or bucket of sand so they can be dug out or uncovered. The main thing is using the same kind of language from the verse over and over again and keeping it fun and a bit silly! I repeat phrases like “Jesus came to find us”, or “Jesus finds lost people”.

I’m giving Jennifer a few things to help her carry on the types of play we’ve been doing if she needs to do separate stuff with Mikey on Sunday morning.

Next week it’s Luke 10:38-42, Mary and Martha.

The latest Play on the Word stuff I’ve been doing follows what Mikey’s age group are doing at Sunday club in church. I’m using their teaching programme for a couple of reasons. Partly as something that is already set out for me – it’s a bit easier! It’s also a way of supporting Mikey’s sunday club ‘buddy’, Jennifer. Jennifer works one-on-one with Mikey during sunday club, helping him stay on task and learn with the other children where possible and working separately with him when the other children are doing things that are beyond his ability or when he is likely to distract them. I wanted to help her find some things to do with Mikey that link in to the main group teaching even if he is learning on his own and in a very different way.

The theme is to do with being friends of Jesus and last week they were looking at Luke 18:15-17 which says:

¹⁵People were also bringing babies to Jesus to have him touch them. When the disciples saw this, they rebuked them. ¹⁶But Jesus called the children to him and said, “Let the little children come to me, and do not hinder them, for the kingdom of God belongs to such as these. ¹⁷I tell you the truth, anyone who will not receive the kingdom of God like a little child will never enter it.”

The main point the group were looking at was that Jesus wanted children to be his friends. For the boys I wanted to focus slightly differently and I majored on two things: coming and receiving. These seemed to be the two main things Jesus wants. He wants the children to come to him and for everyone to receive the kingdom like a child.

Coming

dan coming to me!

For this we played silly fun games where I would stand away from the boys and beckon with crazy enthusiasm calling out “Come! Come! Come on! Come to Mummy!!!!” and shouting and gesturing until they came to me and when they did we cheered and cuddled and tickled and laughed. With Mikey I was very close to him when we played this and helped him come to me – my main aim was that they would have positive experiences of coming to me when I called them. I then used phrases like “we can come to Jesus!” and “Jesus wants us to come to him”. I didn’t want to make this an obedience lesson, so if it didn’t work out it was fine!!

Receiving

Mikey opening his present

Now in our little family the boys rarely get presents from us – aren’t we mean?!! But they’re just starting to get the idea of opening a present and feeling excited about this. So I bought the boys a cheap present  – for us it was a toy broom and dustpan and brush because Mikey has a bit of a thing about sweeping! It could easily have been a 30p tub of bubbles! We got together and gave them the present. In many ways it was a lesson for Dave and I – receiving was natural and joyful for the boys! God wants us to receive his great kingdom just like that!

he swept so fast I couldn't get a picture!