M Joan Willis Gospel Visual Aids for Pre-Schoolers

From time to time I get feedback on the Gospel e Magic Book and sometimes it is not always praise. This is good. I welcome input from those who are thoughtful and want to input ideas that will help others. The main criticism from M Joan is that my book had nothing for children of pre-school age. I must confess I have very little experience of communicating or teaching with this age group. I invited M Joan to make a contribution to the blog and here it is.

M Joan Willis writes the following:

With regards to some of the applications for your trick, the one that comes to mind is the one using the Professor's Nightmare (3 ropes of 3 different sizes). You call it the 3-rope gospel trick. What I do is talk about the love of God and how he loves us all the same and then make the ropes all even. This is quite effective.Think your book has excellent graphics and is extremely well-done. Congratulations.


One 'trick' I particularly like is using three ropes of different colours- about 12" in size each. One end of each rope is a different colour. i.e. green with yellow tip, red with green tip, yellow with red tip. You hold this three ropes in your hand so that for all intensive purposes you have three ropes of three colours. You get the children to form a circle. Talk about God's love. Does he love all the children the same. What about children from Africa? China? Native children, etc. Then you tie the ropes together - using the yellow tip to join with the yellow end, the green tip with the green end and the red tip with the red end. You now have 3 circles which look to the audience that you have a circle of green, red and yellow. You can get the children to choose which circle they want for the children say of other countries. When you have finished chatting with the children you suddenly toss the three circle up in the air and lo and behold you have one big circle (if you do it right!) and you tell them that God loves all the children of the world regardless of where they come from or what colour they are. - this is just a hasty description that I have originated from the set of ropes which are easily obtainable at the magic store, very reasonable and it's very effective.Another thing that I like to do - although not really magic - is to chat with the children and ask them if they have ever made a snowflake (I am sure you did when you were a kid). You show them a square of paper and then fold it to make your snow flake. I fold my paper in half and then in quarters and then once again to form a triangle. At the very centre of the triangel I cut a little hole. If you were to unfold the paper you would see 8 small holes near the very centre. On the fold which is a triangle, I draw an anchor and then cut round it. (I have this done before the presentation but don't show the drawing). When it's unfolded it becomes a lovely snowflake - but don't stop here. You cut out each section of the snowfalke and you have an anchor. On the anchor I print the word 'Jesus' on the stem and at the bottom "God" and give each child one to take home. Explaining that Jesus/God is the anchor for life. This is a very hurried description. Usually I chat about anchors - relating to ships. Actually I probably will use this story tomorrow because being summer we see more boats and often they get anchored for fishing.

Thank you for sharing this M Joan and I wish God's Blessing on your ministry to the children.