late for Lent: update on our foray into Godly Play

This weekend I actually did what I had planned: set up a Lenten table for our home. It's still a work in progress, but it's a start. Here's our version (using the Explore and Express version as a model):

The center is just a pie plate with sand (not real sand, homemade sand: mix 7 cups flour with 1 cup water), 4 peg people (one for each person in our family) and a Jesus I made out of posterboard. This represents our family in the 40 days of wilderness (Lent) with Jesus.

The white candle (yes, it's a Yankee Candle) is our Christ candle, and the little white dish has water in it. This is to signify Jesus' baptism (and our own, for hubby and me) just before he entered the wilderness.

The basket contains the pieces of our Lenten cross puzzle. The puzzle has six pieces, one for each Sunday of Lent. Put together, it looks like this:

Purple on one side, and...

White on the other (for when we get to Easter).

The cross is also just posterboard. I painted one side with purple acrylic paint, and it's supposed to look rough (not pretty and smooth, like the white side). In the future, I'd like to re-make the cross with foam board or mat board - something stronger and stiffer than posterboard, which still has a tendency to curl at the edges and doesn't hold together as a puzzle very easily. The Girl can make it work, but I don't think The Boy could put it together without getting too frustrated.

I had also planned to make prayer pots, thinking I would try this recipe for homemade model magic (air-dry clay), but then I realized we'd have to let them dry for days before we could use them, and we had too much else going on this weekend to get it done anyway. So instead I bought little terra cotta dishes (the kind that go under terra cotta flower pots), one for each kid:

The fabric heart represents God's love for us which is always, always with us. Each week we'll add a new symbol to the prayer pots, basically following Explore and Express's pattern (though since we're "late for Lent," we'll skip one of the symbols).

Our little Lent table (which is a little wooden table that my grandfather made for me when I was 2) sits right next to our TV cabinet in our living room. It's also next the door to our carport - the door we always use. I put it here because (1) it's just about the only available space in our small home and (2) it's in a place we'll see it. Every day, whenever we're in the house, we'll see it. And the kids play with it. There's often wilderness sand scattered on the purple cloth, which is just as it should be. I love that The Girl wants to keep adding to it (though it's such a small table, we're about out of room!). And the prayer pots, which don't fit on the table, sit in the middle of our dining table, one of the places we pray together and talk together as a family.

I'm very happy that we've started our Lenten journey together as a family, but now I've gotta start thinking about Easter so I won't be late for Easter!

FYI: For the Lenten puzzle and the figure of Jesus in the desert, I used the patterns out of the book Young Children and Worship, which was co-written by the original creator of Godly Play (Jerome Berryman) and contains a basic set of Godly Play stories and instructions for how you can make the story sets at home (you can also purchase beautiful wooden story sets, but they're not cheap).