Jesus Without Language

 
This craft comes in two parts. you can chose to use both, or just one of them dependant on your time.

The passage talks about the apostles serving food, it’s an process even the youngest child can help with. This craft makes a tray for serving, a craft short on time and resources. The tray is then filled with food made from sculpting dough, this part of the craft is slightly time intensive to set up and for the youngsters to complete. If you have very young children you can make the trays and just let them use the dough
 

Part 1 – serving tray.

The best way to make a serving tray is with sturdy material. While printing on card will do, it won’t last long. Laminating the cut out tray will make it more durable or using plastic coated card from packaging will work too. If you have the financial oppertunity you can buy small plastic trays and affix an image to them using craft glue.
 

The tray pattern here has been updated with a picture of the hero for this work. It’s a simple design and the image and words can be changed easily. There are two pages of the pdf (LINK), the first has a picture and the second is just the cutting lines. To be honest there is little need for a printout, though i would recommend rounding the corners.

The sides slope if you overlap the corners slightly and fix with sturdy glue. (The handles are cut on on this picture but there really is no need to do so) Once you have your trays it’s a blank canvas. according to your material decorate the trays to make them more appealing, and also to highlight whatever text you have added – I chose the text ‘How can I serve you?’
 

If your trays are plastic then use either permanent markers or a small amount of paint mixed with craft glue so it sticks. I would recommend using small sponge squares for the paint so you don’t add excess water.
If you want you can stop there. Especially if you have been painting the craft can stand alone, however if you have just used card and pencils, or if you have lots more time, then the real fun is in part 2
 

Part 2 – dough food

It’s wonderful to find something really tactile to do with the youngsters that had a direct link to the story. Really you can use plasticine, play dough, clay, or even junk modelling to make your food. I find the simplest and cleanest way is to use salt dough so that what I’ve done here.
 
If you’ve not made salt dough before then it’s really simple. You need 2 cups of flour, 1 cup of salt, one table spoon of oil and one table spoon of lemon juice. (As salt dough is a character recognition tool, the instructions with images can be found there LINK)
 
I split the dough into three balls. Put each into a small plastic bag and started again until I had enough for each child. At the end of the session I gave each child the excess dough to take home by reusing the same plastic bags.
 
You also want to pack wet-wipes and paper towels in your bag. I did give the youngsters toothpicks, but I would advise against giving rolling pins and many sculpture tools.

 

PDF Download now available in other languages
German – thank you Anke	Serbian – thank you Zeljko