Being Different Is Good
All different, all special
by Sophie Jelley (revised, originally published in 2007)
Suitable for Whole School (Pri)
Aims
To celebrate and value the differences between people.
Preparation and materials
- You will need the Bible passage at Romans 12.4–5, which you can read out or retell in your own words.
- You will also need a freshly baked loaf of bread and a bag or box that contains the ingredients to make bread: yeast, flour, salt and water.
- Have available the YouTube video ‘Celebration: playing for change - song around the world’ and the means to show it at the end of the assembly. It is 3.52 minutes long and is available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Lu41LulQos
Assembly
- Explain that today, we are thinking about being different.
It’s great that people are different. Talk with the children about whether two people share the same name in their class. Does everybody look the same? Is everyone the same height? Was everyone born in the same place? Even if two people have the same name, there are no two people who are exactly the same. - Tell the children that you’ve been shopping before coming to school today.
Invite a child to come and look in the bag or box that contains ingredients. Choose some volunteers to take out one ingredient at a time.
Ask the children whether they know what each item is. Ask others to help them if necessary.
Ask the children whether any of them know the word that describes a food that has to be combined with some other foods to make something to eat. Hopefully, someone will say the word ‘ingredient’.
Each of us is different, like the different ingredients, but we can all join together to make one thing. - Explain that you are going to read from the Bible, the Christians’ special book. This bit is taken from a letter that a church leader called Paul wrote to the church in Rome.
Read (or summarize) Romans 12.4–5: ‘For just as each of us has one body with many members, and these members do not all have the same function, so in Christ we, though many, form one body, and each member belongs to all the others.’ - Point out that Paul said that there are lots of different parts of the body, and each one is important, but they all belong together.
Explain that this is a bit like all the different ingredients that we took out of the bag or box; they all come together to make something important. - Ask if anyone can guess which food can be made from these ingredients.
Show the freshly baked loaf.
For the bread to work, it needs all of these things together. Without water, the bread would be dry. Without flour, the bread would not be bread. Without salt, the bread wouldn’t be as tasty. Without yeast, the bread wouldn’t rise. They all need to be there to do their different job to make a perfect loaf.
Optional: you could break off a piece of bread and ask two tasters to report on the flavour, but make sure that you’ve checked your school’s food policy before doing so.
Time for reflection
Christians believe that God made people of different kinds, races, faces, shapes and sizes. They believe that God regards everybody as important. They believe that God meant them all to share the world that he made for them to live in. It is important that we are all different: God meant us to be that way.
Here in our school, everyone is different, too: some are great at football, some at reading, some at playing the recorder, some at drama, some at being kind, some at being helpful or at looking after people who are sad and so on. We are all different, but every one of us is special and every one of us is an important part of the school.
Ask the children to look at their thumb. Explain that there is no one in the world who has the same thumbprint as them. Every single thumb is different and every single person is different, too!
Prayer
Dear God,
Thank you for all of our differences here at this school.
Thank you that you created a whole world full of different people.
Help us to know that this makes the world a beautiful and interesting place to live
Because we are all special to you.
Amen.
Song/music
‘Celebration: playing for change - song around the world’, available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Lu41LulQos (3.52 minutes long)
