Tapestry of Faith: Love Surrounds Us: A Program on the UU Principles and Beloved Community for Grades K-1

Alternate Activity 1: The Great Kapok Tree Play

Activity time: 20 minutes

Materials for Activity

Preparation for Activity

  • Adapt the story into a scripted play and make copies for a number of adult volunteer readers.
  • Arrange to present this story as a play to another RE group, a parent group, or the congregation.
  • Cut card stock into pieces about 3 inches square-enough for 14 characters.
  • Gather pictures of these characters: Narrator, man, boy, monkey, frog, anteater, snake, butterfly 1, butterfly 2, toucan, jaguar, porcupine 1, porcupine 2, and a sloth. Find some on Leader Resource 2, Amazon Animals; cut others from animal magazines or download them from websites such as the Rainforest Alliance website or Enchanted Learning.

Description of Activity

Preparing a play for one another, another religious education group, parents, or a wider audience helps the participants take a more active role in the story and helps them identify with the animals. This play could be used as the children's story during an earth day service or other special occasion such as a Blessing of the Animals.

Ask participants to each take a picture and cut it out and glue it to a piece of card stock. Help them glue each card stock picture to a wooden stick.

Assign parts of the play to participants and leaders.

Perform the play with each participant holding up their character stick as they speak.

Including All Participants

If you have non-readers, they can hold the character stick while another participant does the reading. If you have more participants than parts to play, you can have more than one character stick per character.