Sensory Bible Stories

We’ve recently introduced a new resource to our Sunday morning sessions for children and young people with additional needs. I’d been contemplating how we could better incorporate prayer into our sessions and in particular how we could ensure that children and young people were active participants in times of prayer. I’d always included at the end of each sensory story a short prayer related to truths about God’s character and the gospel taken from that particular Bible story. I’ve talked here about how I’ve used these stories and prayers to pray for children and young people throughout the week. It felt important though to involve the children and young people more in prayer. I wanted them to be able to have some choice in what to pray for and to be able to explore and engage with items related to prayer. With this in mind I put together a shopping bag (which has now graduated to a shoebox!) of items which could be used by children, young people and helpers to pray during our sessi...

 I used to know all the words to 'The Bare Necessities' because I sang it over and over everyday to a boy that I taught. I don't have an amazing singing voice but you wouldn't know that from his reaction. His delight in my efforts motivated me to sing the song again and again and imprinted the lyrics on my mind. There's an idea out there that children and young people with additional needs need very specific, specialized and often expensive resources to be able to access anything including church. Generally, I think that this idea is well-intentioned and comes from a place of wanting to serve these children and young people in the best way possible. Unfortunately though I think that it can be easy for companies to take advantage of those supporting individuals with additional needs by marketing resources as specialized or essential when these may not be the case. While there may be times when children and young people do need specific resources to access church I be...

       Setting up! I wanted to share some resources that we’ve used at Church in the run up to Easter. We were able to run our ministry for children and young people with additional needs under covid-19 restrictions as a support group. It was joyous. For three weeks we played and listened to truths about Jesus coming on a donkey as our King and rescuer. We celebrated like the people on Palm Sunday with balloons and bubbles and a sound button which said ‘Hosanna’. We played with dusty flour and soap and water and some of us even washed our feet as we talked about Jesus washing His friends’ feet. Because He loved them and He loves us. We admired an Easter garden and heard about Mary’s joy at meeting her resurrected friend Jesus in the garden. It had been a long time since we had met together so although I’ve included plans for sensory stories in the resources below our sessions had more of a free-play feel and we didn’t include a structured story time each week. We s...