Puppet shows, shadow plays, claymations… there are many alternatives to the traditional play depending on the interest, talent and size of your group of children. Another unique alternative is creating a whiteboard animation presentation. This is a great way to involve kids – particularly if their bias might be towards art instead of acting! To create a whiteboard animation, video the children drawing the story. You would then speed the drawing animation up and add narration and music to tie it all together. This is a whiteboard animation of “Crossing the Red Sea.” Below is an overview of how the whiteboard animation presentation fit into a larger play for a Sunday School entertainment that involved most of the ecclesia.
{Thank you to Ashley R. for the following post.}
The Christadelphian tradition of an annual Sunday School Entertainment is valuable for many reasons. It is a chance to showcase the efforts of the children to the members of the ecclesia that are not of Sunday School age, and gives the children a chance to put their lessons into action…whether through song, or acting out plays. There is always an air of excitement on Entertainment day!
In our small ecclesia, for some years, we have had each individual class present a play or a song based on lessons they have learned throughout the year. Last year, we thought it would be beneficial to bring the Sunday School together for one big play.
This presented a challenge, as in our ecclesia, we have many young children, and then a bit of an age gap between the young ones and the teens/ How could we incorporate all of these classes within one play?
It was decided to have a play that would incorporate different aspects of performance, from songs, to a standard play, to a video animation for one of the scenes which was put together by the senior teen class (Ages 17+)
We even had some adults join in for one of our scenes.
The play centers around the life of Moses, which was part of the Sunday School studies last year. In Hebrews chapter 11, we are given an excellent summary of the life of Moses, which provided an excellent framework for the play.
The 13-16 year old class portrayed a family doing the readings, reading Hebrews 11. As they read the verses about Moses, and had family discussion, we had “flashbacks” in which the younger class (Ages 4-7) acted out various aspects of the life of Moses.
For one scene, a song, sung by the young class, explained the plagues, in lieu of acting them out.
Another song, based on the Passover, and acted out by some willing brethren, was used as our Passover scene.
And finally, the senior teen/young adult class put together a video “white board animation” to depict the scene of the crossing of the Red Sea.
The play finished up with all of the students aged 13+ singing a song which essentially tied everything together, reviewing the words of Hebrews 11 that pertained to Moses’ life, and that the “family” had read together in the play.