If a picture paints a thousand words, I wonder how many a video paints? This four-and-a-half minute video, which I recorded with Urban Saints, provides you with seven tips to help, encourage and inspire you to make your children's or youth work more accessible and inclusive, to create belonging for everyone. There are loads of links to other resources, videos and information to help you too!
Surely in this day and age there can’t be anyone who would stop children with additional needs or disabilities, and their families, from being able to access church; anyone who would exclude them from all that church offers; anyone who would prevent them from belonging to the church community, can there? But sadly, this does happen all too often and some of the people responsible might surprise you!
How do I include all children & young people with additional needs in my church? As many church children's and youth groups return back after the summer break this week, we explore how everyone can be included and belong.
A few days later, God turned up in the middle of the night… and then I saw an image very clearly in my mind. I remember feeling quite smug, thinking I’d guessed God’s punchline… I’d guessed wrong!
Going on an overseas mission trip can often be a transforming and life changing experience; offering an opportunity to serve in a very different culture and environment, challenging our worldview and our perceptions of our role in the world. Taking young people on a short-term mission trip experience can equip them and inspire them for … Continue reading Can You Take Young People With Additional Needs On Overseas Mission?
A question I get asked loads of times is this; “How can I explain additional/special needs to children?” The answer depends on the context, as there are different ways that this can be responded to, determined by who the answer is meant for. Are we responding to a question from a child with additional needs … Continue reading Answering Children’s Questions About Additional Needs – With Help From Winnie-the-Pooh!
20% of children and young people have an additional need or disability of some kind; if your church includes children and young people, some of them are likely to need additional support. Many of these children and young people, and their families, feel excluded from a wide range of social and other activities, including church, … Continue reading Six Ways To Make Your Children’s Work And Holiday Club More Inclusive
That moment… that moment as a children’s or youth worker when you realise during the ‘talk time’ that you’ve just lost some of your group. They were able to focus for the first three or four minutes, but now, five minutes in, you see them starting to get distracted, starting to fidget. You’ve lost contact … Continue reading Additional Needs Children’s Work: Using What They Enjoy To Help Them Learn
Devoted… an important word, one which we often hear, and a word that we all probably think we fully understand; but do we? How truly deep a word is it? And what might it mean in the context of caring for a child or young person with additional needs; whether as parent, carer, other family … Continue reading Be Devoted To One Another In Love
Perhaps never before has humanity lived in such a self-centred, self-obsessed, self-serving, narcissistic, selfish society as we do now. Advertising and marketing media is filled with slogans such as ‘Because you’re worth it!’, ‘It’s all about you!’, and recently that dreadful advert from TUI (formerly Thomson Holidays), where an entourage of lackeys serve the every … Continue reading Because He’s Worth It!
Delightful Handmade Dog Products and Gifts
An additional needs Dad and Son baking adventure...
Special Education Teaching Resources, Sensory Stories and SEND Information
The Additional Needs Blogfather 