Crafts for Sunday School Curriculum

Imagining Worship with Kids — 2024-2026

In 2024, I heard that the Brehm Center of Fuller Seminary was working on creating some new Sunday School curricula for elementary kids. I reached out to a friend to learn about the project and see if they’d be interested in some crafts for their curriculum (because crafts make everything better!). Their project, “Imagining Worship with Kids,” focuses on 9 spiritual practices, such as hospitality, belonging, and humility, and creating active and hands-on ways for kids to engage with those spiritual practices. Turns out, yes, crafts are a great way to be more hands-on with abstract ideas.

Over the next 2 years, I worked with their team to make crafts for each of these practices. I ended up making 2 crafts for each spiritual practice: one as a more tradition craft for individual kids to create, and one craft that could be made together with a small classroom or community of kids. That ended up as 18 crafts! Some examples are: a community handprint rainbow for the theme of shalom, a breath prayer fidget for the theme of prayer, and a fireworks chandelier for the theme of celebration. 

I created the ideas for each craft and worked to connect those ideas with the themes and verses for each practice. I provided the Brehm team with instructions and assets, such as photos of the stages of each craft, so that they could add these to the websites and magazines they were creating for this project. One of the challenges of this particular project is that I was creating instructions for Sunday School teachers and parents of elementary students, who might not have a lot of crafting experience. The goal was to make the crafts age appropriate, but also accessible for the teachers. 

I especially love how the community crafts bring the kids to work together to create something beautiful that live in their classroom or church space and engage the people who come to that space.