Well here we are at our final Wednesday Words column of 2013! This month we welcome Anna Irish, and with no further ado, here is her introduction and Post!
Anna Irish first encountered Day Camps as a nine-year-old camper, the summer her family moved to Montreal from Europe. She was involved with Crosstalk Ministries through her teens, but found that she connected especially well with Daycamps, and has stayed involved in the years since her three years on Travelling Team, helping with manual chapters and sometimes as a Training Team Leader, and this year, after moving back to the Montreal area, as a committee member.
“Words can’t describe the role that Day Camps has played in my life, at least not the few words that make up a blog post. It has touched so many aspects of life, in some of the same ways that have been touched on by other guest bloggers, as well as many others. In the area of Children’s ministry, the four C’s have continued to influence my approach: Creativity (Craziness does not come as easily to me, though I have occasionally dabbled in it too), Community, Content, and Challenge. But what I’d like to tell you about in this post is an exciting project that that incorporates much of the four C’s principles: remaking the “Follow the Leader” slideshow as a puppet show.I can’t say I have a lot of experience in puppetry, but I have long admired the medium. I became a great fan of the Muppet Show in my teens, and of course enjoyed the antics of Lamb (and in those days cousin Lamb and Dog) at Daycamps. These particular puppets, however, owe their conception to a few happy accidents. I was leading a small youth group in Toronto when an arts camp in the parish resulted in a large quantity of leftover fabric scraps. Not wanting to see them go to waste, I decided to make some puppets with the youth group, so that we could put on a lesson for the Sunday School. A few years earlier a dear friend had given me her collection of Sunday School materials, which included the book Teaching Bible Stories More Effectively with Puppets. The rod puppets especially caught my attention, and since the youth group was quite enthusiastic about crafts, we set to work making paper mache heads, armature for the bodies, and costumes. The project was a hit within and outside the youth group, and culminated (under the next youth leader) in a much-enjoyed performance of the life of Elijah at the parish’s Coffee Hour. From time to time I would think about the puppets, and how the design might be improved, but never had a reason to make any more. When I learned that the committee wanted to do a new slideshow, however, the perfect opportunity presented itself! I thought that it would be a great and (relatively) simple way of adding some live action to the slideshow, which, if all goes well, will be a video this year. The rest of the committee seems pretty excited too.
