Raising the Stakes:
Nurturing a Biblical Imagination
in 8-11 Year Olds
with Tama Ward
Saturday, Sept 12/26 - 9-10:30am (pacific)
If you are wishing your Middle Grader was as excited about the Bible as he or she is about the latest Marvel movie or Disney blockbuster this workshop might be what you're looking for.
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Whether you are a teacher, friend, parent or grandparent with an 8-11 year old in your life, Tama will offer practices, distilled over thirty-five years of working with this under-resourced age group, to keep your middle schooler from "aging out" of Bible Stories.
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You'll be given resources for combining assets older children have in spades, namely imagination and a story with a well-developed plot, to raise the stakes in your own telling and, in so doing, find your listeners wide-eyed and asking the one question all tellers long to hear: "So what happens next?"
Leadership: Tama Ward​​
​Tama is an ordained minister with the Baptist Convention of Ontario and Quebec who currently works as the Minister of Children, Youth and Families at Canadian Memorial United Church in Vancouver, British Columbia. She has spent much of the past thirty five years developing creative ways for young people to engage with the Bible as story.
One of these initiatives was a theatre arts program called Sacred Canopy that ran from 1998-2024 with sites in Vancouver, Mexico and Kenya working in partnership with Protestants, Catholics and Muslims alike. Tama lives along the Fraser River with her husband and two university-aged children and is determined to finish Book One of her fantasy series, The Initiation of Isho Ben Terres, before the leaves turn gold in 2026.​