What do children learn in Spirit Play?
We help children live into their own answers to existential questions such as: Where did we come from? What are we doing here? What is our purpose? How do we choose to live our lives? What are our gifts? How do we use them? What happens when we die? Why do we die? Why are we lonely and sad sometimes?
How does Spirit Play work?
We use the Montessori approach and Berryman’s morning-as-worship approach for the structure of the morning. As in Montessori, the key elements are the classroom environment and the teachers. These elements free the children to work at their own pace on their own issues. In a typical Spirit Play morning:
- The Doorkeeper helps the children get ready to enter the classroom.
- The Storyteller leads the circle in the story of the day, followed by wondering.
- Children choose an art response or to use a story previously heard, helped by the Doorkeeper.
- Children clean-up, encouraged and helped by the Storyteller and Doorkeeper.
- Leave-taking is a formal process of saying goodbye to the Storyteller and Doorkeeper.
What’s the role of parents and caregivers in Spirit Play?
Parents can encourage their children to retell the story after leaving the Spirit Play classroom.
The DRE will send out information about the class on a weekly basis. Use that information to discuss the story with your child in the week following class.
Help us engage children in a deliberate way that will maintain a peaceful and calm atmosphere in class. Children enter and exit one at a time via the Doorkeeper, and we ask that you wait patiently at both the beginning and the end of class while the Doorkeeper helps children settle in at the beginning, and exit calmly at the end.
Please contact Robin Slaw, Director of Religious Education if you have additional questions.
0 Comments