Open the Book

The Open the Book team was formed in order to take Bible stories into the 4 Primary Schools; Coughton CofE Primary School, Great Alne Primary School, Haselor Tudor Grange Academy and St Nicholas CofE Primary School to add to the schools’ collective worship [what we used to call ‘Assembly’]. As you see two are church schools but two are not, yet we receive a lovely welcome at all the schools.

We are just part of the team from Alcester Minster Churches, including the Rector and Children and Family Worker, who visit the schools to take the stories of Jesus to the pupils.

The team, come from a lot of different Minster churches. Currently they are from Alcester, Arrow, Great Alne and Haselor.

We plan, rehearse one story to share with the children during their collective worship. We try to go in to one school each morning one week a month from September to April. We originally had a schedule to go from the Adam and Eve story through to some of Paul’s activities. This would have taken us 6 years to complete, and we expected that children would have moved on before we started to repeat the stories. The stories are now a little more ‘ad hoc’, but we continue to use the Lion’s Children’s Bible as our main source.

We attend each school at the start of the school day and try to arrange to visit each school in the same week, usually visiting a different school on Monday to Thursday of the same week.

If anyone is interested in joining us, please contact the Administrator and she will put you in touch with the team. None of us are in anyway like professionals and, although we do have script, some of us cannot learn our lines but as long as we say ‘more or less’ the right thing, all is well. The current team each has their own simple tunic type ‘costume’ which we can add to for specific roles, e.g., whoever plays Jesus wears the same blue scarf, so the children realise that person is Jesus.