Is church developmentally appropriate for kids? – Read Christina Embree’s argument for including all generations in worship.
Grants up to £1000. The All Churches Trust has launched an exciting new Growing Lives fund designed to help churches and Christian organisations connect with children and young people and forge lasting links with families in their area. All the details.
Book Seriously Messy, four experienced authors and practitioners offer intergenerational approaches for engaging with questions of death and life in a safe and supportive setting.
Seriously Messy pub. BRF £8.99
Children and Bereavement – About 1:29 children are likely to experience the death of a parent or sibling before they are 16. How can we support them through their grief? Here are some useful articles and websites.
Explaining death and dying to children
How schools should support bereaved students
The Childhood Bereavement Network
Additional Needs – Click for a list of resources and support around additional needs.
The Additional Needs Alliance Facebook page is a great place for support and ideas.
The Methodist Church, Urban Saints, Additional Needs Alliance and Count Everyone In have produced Belonging – a resource to help churches consider how everyone, regardless of their needs, can belong.
The Impact of Parental Absence Produced by the Naval Families Federation. An important read if you have Service families in your congregation or school.
Timothy O’Malley argues that understanding and comprehension are not what’s important for children in worship and that ‘in the end, the Church’s liturgy was made for infants. It is us—in our boredom and apathy—who have to change, rather than the children.’
The hand-print debate You can turn a hand print into almost any kind of picture, but in this challenging article Gai Lindsay ponders ‘the experiences offered to (or imposed upon) children in the name of art. We must reflect about the production of adult-controlled, adult-altered child hand prints and strongly advocate for children’s human right to make and express meaning through the arts and to “engage in play, recreation and cultural and artistic life”? (UNHRC, Article 31).
Research seems to be showing that consistently greeting children as they enter a space increases their engagement. Here’s a video showing how children chose how to be greeted in one class. What difference might it make to the situations where we are with children?
Do our resources give the right message? This article is a good example of an important reminder that we often don’t actively consider what the materials we use say to the children in our groups. Are we sending a message that God’s love is for a particular ethnicity? Use the link to read ‘creating a diverse classroom library’.
