Friargate has a thriving children's meeting that meet every Sunday in the Fox Room.
Each week there is a different theme and activities to entertain the children while parents, grandparents and guardians, relax and enjoy the Quaker meeting. After about forty-five minutes, the children can chose a book bag to take into the main meeting where they join the adults.
The Children are currently creating a timeline stretching back to 1600
Mandalas
Here, the children’s group created Mandalas, circle patterns used in Eastern religions, in the garden. They made them as co-operative patterns, three children to each mandala. The children had to agree on patterns and physically negotiate each other to make their mandalas.
This was when lockdown had finished...
“We are meeting at the Meeting House as well now. We do similar activities there and use the meeting house garden for games as well. We did these chalk portraits of ourselves on Zoom in the meeting garden in May 2021”.
The Camino de Santiago
On Sunday 12th June 2022 Children’s Meeting were visited by Terry and Maddie Kay who shared their experience of pilgrimages to Compostella. They arrived in walking gear and carrying rucksacks filled with the items they would normally take on a pilgrimage. We were able to see a log book and look at all the stamps representing completed stages of the walk. This Summer, Terry is walking the whole route again from Santiago and Maddie will join for part of the journey.
Inspired by their plans, we made our own pilgrimages around Friargate garden then took turns in walking it. We learned to greet each other in Spanish with the words ‘Buon Camino’. Although we didn’t walk 600 miles it was fun and we didn’t get any blisters.
Yorkshire Youth Development Worker
Jo Baynham our Yorkshire Youth Development worker is spending some time helping us to develop our youth and children’s work in York, at the area meeting level.
The bedrock of what he is proposing a three stranded;
- Regular Socials, mostly for teens but occasionally all age
- Teen meetings for worship in a variety of locations around the AM, not always on a Sunday
- Regular in person Quaker philosophical exploration sessions called “Big Questions?”.
Beyond this, it is hoped that Jo can support the youth, children’s and all age leadings, events and ideas of York AM meetings with a view to collectively building a welcoming and exciting programme of provisions.
Such support might be,
- Helping individual LM’s think about youth outreach
- Supporting and facilitating all age meetings for worship
- Supporting day trips and events
- Supporting meetings as they grapple with safeguarding and statutory compliance
- Training and supporting volunteers
2023 York AM Youth work enquiry form
A form by which York Friends can volunteer and suggest to the York Youthwork project