This past Sunday, I got a chance to teach in our tiny Sunday school. Just one girl showed up, A—; my co-teacher was A—‘s grandmother.<\/p>\n
We have been using the curriculum “Stories about God” by Mary Ann Moore, a curriculum which exposes children in the primary grades to a wide range of God-concepts. Moore is especially interested in feminist theology and non-orthodox God-concepts. On Sunday we did the session on “God as Mother of Us All.”<\/p>\n
In this session, Moore has the children do a creative movement exercise. Creative movement is not one of my strong suits. Over the years, I’ve led a fair number of creative movement exercises with children, and even with teens and adults, but I’ve never been satisfied with my efforts. Suddenly I was not looking forward to teaching Sunday school.<\/p>\n
But then I remembered that the old “Haunting House” Sunday school curriculum came with a little booklet by Barbara Kres Beach on doing creative movement with kids, and I remembered that in that booklet was an idea that might help me out. I dug out my bootleg copy of “Haunting House,” and found the photograph I remembered: a picture of children in a sunlit room doing creative movement exercises, with a woman in the background holding a frame drum and a drumstick. Kres Beach suggests: Use a drum to set the pace and tone when you do creative movement with kids. Ah, ha! — all of a sudden I was ready to try creative movement.<\/p>\n
By chance, I own a bodhran (an Irish frame drum), and I brought it in on Sunday. The creative movement exercise starts out with the children lying on the floor, breathing peacefully and quietly — I made circles on the drumhead with the beater, a soft and meditative shh-shh-shh sound. Everyone stands up and takes a big step! — a tap on the drum, and A— and her grandma were on their feet, stepping forward and reaching to the sky! I did a slow beat on the drum when that was called for, and a faster, wilder beat when that was called for. At last we finished up back on the floor, with me making the soft shh-shh-shh sound with the beater again.<\/p>\n
It was magical. The simple addition of a drumbeat made it so. A— had a blast (so did her grandmother, and so did I!).<\/p>\n
Then it was time for the story, and A— was ready to settle right down and listen. “Stories about God” is a good curriculum, and the story built on the creative movement exercise. I felt that A— really understood the God-concept I was trying to get across, and the simple addition of a drumbeat meant allowed me to pull it off.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
This past Sunday, I got a chance to teach in our tiny Sunday school. Just one girl showed up, A—; my co-teacher was A—‘s grandmother. We have been using the curriculum “Stories about God” by Mary Ann Moore, a curriculum which exposes children in the primary grades to a wide range of God-concepts. Moore is […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-784","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-religious-education"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/784","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=784"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/784\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=784"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=784"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=784"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}