Welcome to a Godly Play classroom at First Baptist Church, Greenville, SC!
Let me share with you about our space, but remember that you don’t have to have big classrooms to enjoy Godly Play. You don’t have to worry about having beautifully decorated classrooms either. The focus is on the materials, and the materials are beautiful enough in their simplicity. It is helpful to have neat, clean rooms without distracting clutter. Since clutter is a personal challenge, I have to work on that!
Here’s the story telling part of the room.
Try to ignore the fan. Our room gets a little warm in the summer, and I forgot to move it out of the way for the photo.
We sit on the floor together so a rug is important. The bookshelves define our sacred space for sharing the stories. (They’re not expensive. I bought them at Big Lots for about $20 each, but I had to put them all together. That was a job!) This is a classroom for 4th grade. Different classrooms use different ways to store the materials. Some classes for younger children have the materials in cabinets because they find that the materials are too tempting during the story time. I love sitting with the class encircled by the stories, though.
Below on the right you see a set of gold boxes. Each box contains a different parable, and the gold color reminds us that they are treasures Jesus gave us.
Here you see our desert box. This is a nice one with a lid, but you could use a dishpan or a plastic box to hold the sand. In order to tell the desert stories, it’s really helpful to have some kind of desert box.
This photo shows where the storyteller sits. (On a nice stack of pillows to accommodate her older behind. ?
See the radio? We always have soft music playing as the children come in. We leave it on, at a very low volume during the story.
Behind the storyteller is the candle, which is lit throughout the Sunday school hour. There is also the Holy Family set up on the same shelf, with the appropriate liturgical color cloth underneath. We also keep a set of Bibles right there within arm’s length to read the story during the closing time.
We’re lucky enough to have space for the Creative Expression time, after the story is told. We have room for several long tables and chairs like this.
You can see more about how we use this space under the page, “Our Creative Gift to God.”
So that’s our fourth grade classroom. How is yours different?