When my children were small, I was a Sunday school teacher for several years. I never pictured myself as a Sunday school teacher, but sometimes parenthood throws you into unexpected roles (such as fashion police, never-get-a-day-off chauffeur, drama coach to the overly dramatic , etc. This could be a long list. Maybe a future blog post). Anyway, the curriculum we used was called “Godly Play” which was influenced by the Montessori method of education. We taught Bible stores using sets of toys that we mostly made ourselves and involved the children in the telling of the stories. They loved to get out the toys and tell the stories themselves. Since many of the stories take place in the desert, we had a big box of sand for that setting, which the kids had great fun with. We always had a craft that pertained to the story. We sang songs that related to the stories and often used sign language in the songs. The idea was to involve the children in learning through many channels: tactile, visual, kinetic, audible, and to encourage them to absorb the stories in their own way. I was impressed with the level of engagement we saw and with how much of the material they remembered.
This experience opened up a whole new world for me. I am not a trained educator and had never thought much about education, but I was fascinated by the concepts we used in our classes. Part of the emphasis in “Godly Play” is the encouragement of creativity. This got me interested in questions of where creativity comes from and how it can be developed. I began thinking and reading about this subject, to a whole new level of nerdiness. I came to believe that each of us is some type of artist, but that our culture doesn’t value or nurture this part of us. We have to cultivate it in ourselves and in our children. Otherwise, we miss out on a great portion of the richness of life.
This is what my creative work is really all about. I want to encourage others to expand their creative powers and to share their love of making stuff with their children, to inspire the children to in turn to discover and value their own art, whatever it may be.
This video is one of my favorite finds in the realm of material on creativity. If the video feed doesn’t work, go to the web page here.
Rachel Manring 