Easter: School workshop

This week I joined a group of people at St.Mark's church in Barrow in Furness and together we ran some creative Easter workshops for children.  There were four workshops each covering a different creative area;  Visual arts, music, creative writing and dance.  I worked as part of the visual arts group.

The workshops were open to children from two schools, one year group from each.  The children were shared between the four creative groups (about 16 in each) and in each group, half the children were from one school and half from the other.

The theme for the day was Easter.  The main organiser of the day kicked off the morning with a time of introductions and fun before giving a short talk about Easter and what it means for us.  She did a brilliant job involving the children and encouraging them to think about and share what they thought Easter was about and every now and again she got them to shout together "I am special and God loves me."  The children were all from faith schools, one Catholic and one Church of England, so they had a good knowledge of Easter and why it is important.  They were able to explain to us that when we celebrate Easter, we are celebrating the fact that Jesus is the Son of God, he died on the cross to pay for our sins so that we can be forgiven and have eternal life!

After she had finished her introduction to Easter we split off into our workshop groups...

For the visual arts workshop we began by sitting in a circle and taking a moment to get to know one another a bit better, going over names and ages.  We then explained that in this workshop we would be using art to express what Easter means to us.  We asked the children to sum up Easter in one word and we wrote these words on a whiteboard.  They came up with some excellent descriptions including [the] Cross, Love, Forgiveness and Resurrection/Life.  We then showed the children what materials we had to work with and some examples of different arty techniques they could try out including stencilling, laminating tissue paper to create 'stain glass', collage, painting...whatever they could think of!  We set them in their pairs (one child from each school) and gave them a sheet of paper for rough drafts as they decided what they might like to do.  We encouraged them to think about the list of words we had compiled about Easter and to think of one they might like to make a picture about. 

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Here are the images the children came up with.  By far the most popular material choices were painting or making a laminated tissue paper 'stained glass window'.  Alongside their art works the children also wrote a couple of sentences about the work, explaining what they had drawn and why.  The main themes they chose to express were God's love and the resurrection (life).

Once the children had completed their projects they were able to take an old CD and decorate it with coloured sharpie pens.  They did this individually, decorating it with Easter related words and pictures.  Later when presenting the work to the rest of the school we laid the CDs out together to make the shape of a cross.  This was a good reminder that Jesus loves us all individually and died for every single one of us.

We also had two big collaborative art works for the kids to take part in.  Earlier in the week we drew out two simplified world map outlines underneath which we wrote out John 3:16.  Using a heart shaped hole punch we cut out hundreds of little coloured love hearts and used scissors to cut some slightly bigger ones.

When the children finished the other projects we set the maps up at the back with the hearts and some glue sticks.  The children then went between the two maps and filled all the landmasses up with coloured hearts to represent the love that God has for us all.

This brought us to the end of the session.  We had about ten minutes for a quick juice break and to gather our work together for the presentation at the end of the morning.  Our group went first for the presentation, we went on to the stage and the children held their work up and explained what each piece was about.  We lay the CDs out in the cross shape on the floor and the two maps were also displayed.  When we finished, the children from the music workshop performed a rap and Jesus, the creative writing group read poems about Easter (focusing on Jesus) and the dance group came and performed a dance to God's great dance floor by Chris Tomlin.

 It was a brilliant morning, the kids engaged and enjoyed themselves and I was thankful to be part of it.  Once again it was lovely to see people connecting and expressing themselves to God through the arts.
Soli Deo Gloria