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...

 The afternoon that I went to get my second Astra-Zeneca dose I had time to kill on a high street for the first time in a long while. I ate a waffle, I bought some running socks from Marks & Spencer's and I wandered around a couple of charity shops. It all felt quite novel but for a long time I've found charity shops novel and interesting. A few weeks later I went charity-shop-shopping again with a purpose in mind to find some puzzles which the children at Church could enjoy during free-play. I found exactly what I was looking for, two beautifully illustrated animal-themed puzzles in perfect condition. A couple of years ago when I'd just begun to share Bible stories with our little band of pioneers I went to the charity shops armed with a list of resources which I thought would be useful for the task ahead. I found a toy sheep for the many sheep-related Bible stories, a boat for all the adventures on the water, and a baby doll. I even found a beautiful board book of Bib...

 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...