i Can Taste (Jesus turns water into wine)

Went with Godly Play "style" story.

Resources Needed:

• 6 glass jars
• 17 pegs (although less would be ok)
• A cup (I used a brass one)
• Red food colouring (natural works best it's thicker)
• A jug and some water

To tell the story:

Jesus was at a wedding party, with his 1,2,3,4,....12 (12 pegs) special friends. His mother, Mary (1 peg) was also there. Mary said to Jesus (1 peg) "There is no more wine"

Mary said to the servant (1 peg) "Do what ever Jesus tells you" Jesus said "fill those jars with water". These are small jars but the ones that day were very big, these are glass jars but the ones that day were made of stone. The servants filled the 6 jars with water. (fill with water)

Jesus said "Now take some to the master of the party" (Pour some water from a jar into the cup (you will have put some food colouring in).

The master drank from it and said "This is wine, this is very good wine"

He took it to the Bride and groom and told them to taste it, they tried it and they said "This is the best wine, people usually have the best at the beginning of a party but you have saved it until the end."

This was the best wine they had tasted.

At this point the children were chanting let us look, so I poured the water into the jar and sure enough it turned the water red. They asked it to be done for each of the jars, as you can see it got lighter. But the children were still in awe! I said that when it happened that day Jesus made them all the same. When we had done all the jars, I shared a secret with them! I said this was Jesus' first miracle and He really did that, but I was just telling them about this and I can't change things like Jesus, so I used food colouring. I showed them the bottle of colouring. I felt passionate that the children should not see that I changed the water and thus overshadowing the message of the story. But they still were captured with the wonder, but not distracted by the "magic"

The wondering questions are on the planning sheet from yesterday.

I Can Taste (Jesus turns water into wine)

Same format as usual play activities relating to the story theme, this week the theme was "I Can Taste". We are still using the Tiddlywinks Blue Book, so our themes are set out and there are a wonderful selection of activity ideas in the book but I prefer to choose my ideas and then go and have look to see if there are any alternatives/ additions in the book that may be appropriate. This time (like often) we were pretty much on the same line.

Firstly milk shake cafe, this was perfect as we already had this up at home, a favourite activity!

There are some printouts that I created available on the TES Website (free joining), to support the role play.

I think I made more of an emphasis on the event being a wedding and provided some wedding dress up materials.

Including these flower girl posy rings, there's more on them at alljoinin blog

I downloaded the wedding march onto my iphone, but this was too quite and needed me to operate. I wish I had have used our mozart cube instead!

The trusty Mr Face, to particularly look at mouths.

Water play with jugs and cups, adding colouring during play for children to observe the change. Maybe use red like wine?

Juicing oranges (the orange theme on right entirely accidental) We used a picnic knife to cut - this is serrated enough to cut orange but not skin (I hope!) I placed the juicers onto non slip kitchen mats, to support little hands.

We made Banana Milk shake (VERY SIMPLY), and here is the recipe I created. It got rather wet afterwards from a spilt drink hence the state in the picture.

We actually used sweetened soya milk so we didn't need any extra sweetener. But if you were using cows milk or unsweetened maybe you would, or maybe add some banana yoghurt. This went down SOOO well!

For one of our response options we decorated cakes, like they may have at a wedding (another opportunity to talk about taste, weddings, and changes). It actually ended up that all the children wanted to decorate cakes and we didn't do any other response activity as we ran out of time, probably because we spent sooooo looooong tasting our orange juice and milk shake in the circle time (didn't anticipate that being so successful). Note I used these silver spoon icing tubes (I was very busy that weekend and was doing everything to make my life easier and it was 3-4-2 offer), not entirely brilliant for little hands they required rather intense squeezing!

I will follow up with how I chose to tell the story shortly