Song of Songs - the end result

Ok.

After wrestling for about a month with this I decied to tackle the story of Song of Songs with 4-8 year olds! We are all still alive and well. Here's the scoop.

The kids stayed in service for the opening and confession and then they had their own time in their own space. Before we even started, C (4 yrs old) was excited because she had learned the first song at the beginning of service.That was cool! Two songs we could have done (but didn't): "His Banner over Me is Love" (we did that two Sundays ago?) and "I Will Rejoice in You and Be Glad" (another oldie) "As a Doe" might work, too.

We did Song of Songs as a multi-sensory story about a king and a girl who loved each other. I had a brown sheet on the floor for our tent, a flat rubbermaid container for sand and lots of pictures of concrete objects from the story strewn around on the sheet (palace, antelope, mountains, apple tree, etc) . I used faceless puppet type dolls to tell the story: Solomon more golden, Shulammite more brown, lady friends lighter from being in the palace. :)

Pruned it to a picture book format of 32 short pages but ended up having to skip a lot of it to keep things moving. If I did it again I would seriously prune the story to at least half of what I did. A picture book story is more clearly a story and faster paced. I focused more on the imagery than the story. That may have been a mistake.

My hope was to catch lots of sensory images for the kids. As it turns out all the sensory detail was almost overwhelming. (Which I find interesting given the nature of the tale.) They listened to the story. They picked out the pictures to go with the story from the pictures strewn on the sheet.

We focused on things in the story: things to see, hear, taste, smell, touch. So we were trying to give them words and language and experiences and memories to go with the words as the place to start interacting with the Word. I think that part worked. I think it worked especially well.

Our eight year old was right with me. I think he enjoyed it the most. Our two four year olds were torn between wanting to play and wanting to hear the story.

We also noticed eyes, hair, etc etc. A neck like a tower was pretty funny. We used a necklace and earrings.

We included the smell of spilled perfume and blew it around with pieces of paper for wind. We had lots of foods to tastes from the story. They like cashew nuts. Not crazy about the figs, but they tried them!

My two high school helpers had the idea of taking the pictures on the sheet and gluing them in succession on a long paper as the kids picked out the pictures during the story. They wrote the name of each picture next to the picture. That turned out to be a really good idea. The visual representation of the story, I think, made the experience something a little more concrete. Because the idea for that came as we were starting, we didn't have Solomon and the Shulamite and the ladies among the pictures. Can't have a story without characters. :) Maybe we'll add them next week.

One of the four year olds used the dolls to tell me a story after we were done. The other kids helped hang the story banner out in the hall.

What would be most interesting to me is what the kids took home, if anything!

Next week one of the moms is doing different prayer stations with the kids. Should be fun!