Visiting Bag

In one of my previous jobs I worked in administration for the council, in particular the children's Integrated Disability Service (Teaching & Learning). I had the opportunity to be part of the pre-school team, this meant I sat in on children's education plans and funding meetings, made resources for the teams, including the autism, hearing, speech and language teams and made up information packs, minutes, etc for these teams.

But what does that have to do with a visiting bag? Well, my idea to use a resources bag (or something similar) when I go on pastoral visits came from this work done with council - although it has grown from there.

As part of my work I go and visit children and families in their homes. This is the pastoral part of my role and can just be a short thing or involve a whole evening. Sometimes these visits are not just easy times chatting and playing with what the children have but involves needing a stimulus to help conversation or just something to develop "bonding time". Part of these visits are to build friendships with the families but it is also about sharing things about Jesus with them and finding ways to improve church and what we do there.

In most of these visits I take a visiting bag with me. The visiting bag has things to help conversation, games for those who talk better over an activity, books that we can read together and flyers and information for the children.

I would definitely recommend a visiting bag for others who want to visit children and families in their home. I like to make some of the things in the bag more sensory but I will discuss that in a post soon.

My visiting bag was recently stolen out the boot of my car, this gave me the challenge of creating a whole new visiting bag. One of the benefits regarding the bag, is that items in it can be interchanged. Thinking what the the topics coming up in junior church, services, church related groups, holiday clubs or festivals means that items can be placed in the bag that relate to these. For example, when we were talking about Daniel in the lions den, a small soft toy lion was kept in the bag. And when the topic was David and Goliath, a Mr Men book called "Mr Noisy and the Giant" was used to help talk of Holiday Club.

I've included some pictures as there is a lot that goes into the bag, things for travelling, easy to use, child friendly and fun. I'm sure more things will be blogged regarding the great resource that is the visiting bag.