A Sherbert Sort of Room, A Navy and Green Room, and a Jungle Room

Perhaps I was hungry that day.  Maybe the fact that I had a gallon of lime green paint (left over from painting my studio) informed the color choice for this room.
Maybe the fact that the shelves were already orange, although a clownish sort of fifties orange influenced the eventual sherbert color scheme for the Seasons of the Spirit classroom at St. Mark's. 

Hmmm...need to iron that banner!

Fabulous vintage fifties chairs, holding up well after all these years.

The Rite - 13 Class chose their color scheme themselves based on several different choices: navy and orange, green and navy, or navy and red.   I created three different color schemes, all using navy and pinned examples on Pinterest.  We were working with two existing vintage Bertoia chairs and navy blue leather couches and chairs that had languished in storage for the past five years.  Here is the result...

Opps, still need to paint that bottom shelf.

At the open house, many parents exclaimed, "it looks like a Starbuck's."  I think they meant that as a compliment.  These young teens are delighted with new more grown-up space.

Our older teens who are now in Journey to Adulthood decorated their classroom last year, but are now thinking of re-furbishing their space.  Perhaps a little competition is spurring them on to greater decorating heights!  Sorry, the photo of this room did not turn out.  I will try to remember to re-take it and do a "before" and "after" when this age completes their re-do.

The Godly Play classroom moved downstairs this summer due to the construction of our new Montessori school that opens on Tuesday (more about that in the next post!)   Here is their bright and airy classroom.

Story Telling and Worship Space

 

Art Response area

And finally, this Children's Worship Space, called Joy Jungle, was created when I first worked at St. Mark's with the help of a lot of talented folks.  

Twenty-five years later (with a few changes) it is still functioning as intended.  Here children are introduced to lesser known Bible stories not covered in their classroom curriculum's, re-tell the stories through puppets plays and theater, celebrate the seasons of the church year with special crafts, play Bible games, and watch Bible videos. 

 What is in that treasure box you ask?  Well God's Word of course, and also the rules the kids made of for behavior standards.  Take a look...

Added the week the news media was all about a middle schooler being expelled for bringing a gun to school.

The child who wrote this explained that people hardly ever dared you to do something good.

 

Written by someone (OK, me!) who once had to pick up every single puppet off the floor. 

 My personal favorite, since the trees are made of wire and paper mache.

We are currently learning about the Fruits of Spirit.  We have a great curriculum developed by Shining Star Publications (sadly, no longer in business, although an internet search will bring up several sites that have used copies) with lots of activities.

We have several books with CD's by Anthony Paul on some of the Fruits of the Spirit.

Purchased way back in the 90's from Bibles Plus

And, of course, there are the resources found online.  Thanks to Tony Kummer  for rounding up lots of ideas including the highly successful Bingo Game by Kristin Charles.  Visit Kristin and Tony at Ministry-to-Children.com for more exciting and fun games to learn Bible stories.  We also used a two posters from DLTK as visual reminders of the lessons.  One is a very upbeat cadence that was fun to  use with our rhythm instruments.  

Thanks to Asher Barreras, professional musician, for facilitating this activity. Asher is one of team teachers for our Rite-13 class and is also starting a youth praise band at St. Mark's this month. Visit St. Mark's website for more information.