Beyond the chapel door there are lots of places to choose for an outdoor chapel opportunity. There’s the playground, where we once danced ‘Lord of the dance’ and a piece of grass where we once did ‘The Enormous Turnip ‘.
This school year I was determined to hold chapel outdoors sometimes after reading about The Forest Church Movement. I love to worship in the open air myself so I really wanted to introduce this option more regularly. I also wanted to emphasise that we don’t just do chapel in chapel.
So far this term (currently it’s week 5) we’ve had Preschool Chapel Storytime outside, in their own playground. We did a circle story about a boat in a stormy sea making the wind and waves together followed by some songs.
We also had years 1 and 2 chapel outside when we did the Jesus life line string game. I have described this activity before: you need a long bit of string and some pegs. We put pegs on the string together as we remember things from Jesus’ life.
Today we had chapel for years 3 to 6 outside on the grass tennis court (no tennis happening at the time). It was a bit last minute as I had only discovered the chapel was not available 10 minutes before we were due to start.
We did a rather bigger circle activity with about 60 children in the circle. As we sang the song ‘He’s got the whole world in his hands ‘ We passed a world around the circle. It was quite windy but nothing like Haiti so we spent a moment thinking of children there and in other parts if the Caribbean experiencing extreme weather conditions today. Then we threw the ball to each other as we prayed for people and places we are concerned about: our families, our school, children in other countries including Syria and Pakistan and homeless people were some if them.
It was about 10 minutes altogether but enough to mark the end if the school day.

On our school and on our working
The help of God