I had lots of fun on placement at St Oswald’s Infant School in Durham last week. I did an assembly on Pentecost on the Thursday which was great fun to deliver as there are 17 different countries represented in the school and the children got so excited as I listed their countries in the place of the list Luke gives us in Acts 2:

And how is it that we hear, each of us, in our own native language? Parthians, Medes, Elamites, and residents of Mesopotamia, Judea and Cappadocia, Pontus and Asia

Following the assembly I did an RE lesson with Year 2, part of which was making some Pentecost pinwheels – incorporating the wind and fire of the Holy Spirit. I got the inspiration for this from this website here which I found via a search on Pinterest. This reminded me of how brilliant a resource Pinterest is for craft activities for children (and in particular Christian ones as I think a lot of home schooling takes place in the States where there is great enthusiasm for Pinterest).

So in case you want to try the same, here is a downloadable template for making one of these windmills.

It works best when printed onto thin white card.

Another part of the lesson was thinking about the words LOVE, PEACE, HOPE and JOY and what they mean to us. I listed these words in the different languages represented in the school. Since it took me quite a while to find these words in these languages I share them here in case you want to use them. Those that are normally written in a non-latin script are written in phonetic English.

Farsi – omid

French – espoir

Spanish – insinuación

Polish – nadzieja

Russian – nadeyatsya

Urdu – ummeed karna

Dutch – hoop

Georgian – imedi makvs

Irish Gaelic – Tá súil

Turkish – umut

Greek – elpída

Korean – gidae

Kannada – bharavase

Latvian – cerība

Japanese – kibō

German – hoffnung

Indonesian – berharap