Praise Biscuits

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You will need: Biscuits (at least one per child), icing sugar, water, food colouring, eye-droppers (unused!!), knives for spreading, cocktail sticks, heart shaped sprinkles or hearts cut out of fondant.

Read Psalm 148 together or talk about the great things about who God is.  What do you want to celebrate about Him?  What is praise?  How can we praise God?  What does worship feel like?  How would you express praise in colour? Set out your equipment and get ready!

Make up a  bowl of thick white icing with the icing sugar and some water.  Then make up some individual bowls of different coloured icing, slightly more runny in consistency than the white icing.

Spread a biscuit with white icing and then use the droppers to drop dots of coloured icing on top.

Use a cocktail stick to make swirls in the icing, expressing the colourful, imaginative, amazing nature of God- let the children do this as the mood takes them!

Add a heart to the top of the swirls as a reminder of God’s love for us and our love for God.

Finally, eat the biscuits and thank God again for how Good he is!

Pipe Cleaner Worship

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With thanks to Tanya Lord for these ideas.

Speak to the children about what worship is e.g. telling God how great he is and thanking him for all of the wonderful things he has done for us.

Get the children to think of words to describe God and put them into a big poster…

Then ask them to use a pipe-cleaner to make shapes representing an aspect of who God is, how we respond to God in worship or what they would like to say to Him.  Expect some fascinating responses!

Here are some examples of what one particular group of children came up with…

People praising God, praying or (in the case of the yellow person) holding a hand in the air “to say ‘yes’ because Jesus is so awesome!”
Various hearts to reflect God’s love of us and our love for God.
A dove to symbolise God’s purity.  This child then said that half of the shape was yellow because God was ‘golden’.

A variety of musical notes from children who found beauty in the music a reflection of God.

Two examples from a 5 year old: a person dancing and a snail because even snails worship God (we had just been learning the verse from psalm 150 ‘Let everything that has breath praise the Lord’!)

Enjoy exploring!

Toddler Group Crafts

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The key to great crafts at a toddler group is to find something easy and open-ended.  That way there is less work for the leaders and more fun and exploration for the children.  Just a warning- easy can also sometimes be messy so make sure you have a collection of aprons or old shirts to hand!

Here are some tried and tested toddler group crafts…

Painting with nature

Playing with oobleck (a mixture of water and cornflour)

Playing with shaving foam on a tray

Plastic bag rainbow painting

Rolling egg paintings

Click here to go to a Pinterest board full of more ideas!

Lunchtime Club Prayer Box

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Here is a selection of tried and tested ideas that can be taken into school and used as a prayer session, perhaps as part of a lunchtime club.  Everything fits in a big box and makes prayer a very active and involving activity for the children.  Exploring prayer with children is always an amazing experience, so be prepared to be bowled over!

‘What would you like to say to God?’ graffiti board (all you need is wallpaper lining and pens!)

Reflective prayers to colour in (very popular!)

Laminated maps (find a place you want to pray for, ask God to bless that place and stick a sticky dot there to show you’ve prayed for it)

Laminated people shapes- write prayers for people on the sheets with dry wipe pens

Prayer cubes

Prayer chatterboxes– the most popular!

When we tried this at a lunctime club, we managed to have some great conversations with children and some of them opened up in a way they never had before.  They were eager to make their own chatterboxes, choosing what to pray for under each flap. One of the girls who was praying with the maps stuck a spot on the Antarctic because she was concerned about global warming!

If you use some of these ideas, please let us know how it goes!

Creche: Welcome Songs

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Here are some songs to welcome children to a session.  For children under 5 it’s great to build up a reassuring routine and songs are an important part of this process.  Enjoy singing!

Welcome song (To the tune of Frere Jaques)

Hello, welcome,

Hello, welcome,

Friends are here,

Friends are here,

Let’s all join together,

Let’s all join together,

God is near,

God is near.

Thank you song (to the tune of ‘Happy Birthday’)

Encourage children to think of something they’d like to say thank you to God for and then get singing (filling in the blank with the name of whatever or whoever it is!)

Thank you Jesus for ——

Thank you Jesus for——

Thank you Jesus for ——-

Thank you Jesus for ——

All Age: Christmas Gifts Talk

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This is a talk that can be easily used in an assembly or for an all age service and focuses on the idea of Jesus being an unexpected gift.

You will need: 4 items to wrap as gifts.  One should be really easy to guess (e.g. a book), a couple should be quite difficult to guess (I used sunglasses and a duck shaped door stop!) and one should be an ordinary looking, quite boring container with chocolate coins hidden inside.

Ask the congregation what their favourite thing about Christmas is.  Gifts are bound to come up! Talk about why we give gifts- to show people that we love them and care for them.  Ask everyone to try and guess what is wrapped up in your gifts.  Start with the easy to guess gift, proceed onto the harder to guess gifts and end with the box containing chocolate coins.  Each time, after guesses have been made, reveal what the gift is.

Explain that sometimes we know immediately what we’ve been given but sometimes it’s harder to work it out and we even get gifts that aren’t what they first seem on the outside.  Talk about the fact that Jesus is Immanuel ‘God with us’.  God came down as a baby, the first Christmas gift,  but like the container with chocolate in it, he wasn’t what we expected!  On first sight he would have been just an ordinary human baby, but actually he was a treasure worth more than we can imagine.  He was a gift that meant we could be brought closer to God and, through him, God could show how much He loves us.   Share out the chocolate and as you eat it, pray that we will all come to see How much God loves us this Christmas.