KidMin Programming Archives - Page 12 of 16

{Guest Post}: Teaching Children From Hard Places (Part 1)

02/19/201402/19/2014 Kathie Phillips

Note from Kathie: Today’s guest post is from my friend Carla Adair Hendricks. I pray you’ll be blessed, inspired and challenged in the first of a two-part post.

As an adoptive momma, an advocate for adoptive and foster children and a Children’s Ministry leader, I love when my passions collide. A few weeks ago, my passions collided when I had the opportunity to train the Children’s Ministry volunteers at my church, Mosaic Church of Central Arkansas, on the topic “Teaching Children from Hard Places.”

My main point? If we as Children’s Ministry teachers are going to impact the children that we serve – even those who come from challenging environments and backgrounds – we must remove the old lenses we’ve been wearing in our classrooms and replace them with new ones.

Lens #1: View yourself as an advocate for children.

Becoming a teacher – even an occasional teacher in Children’s Ministry – is a high calling. It’s a calling that involves more than teaching Bible verses and leading “sword drills”.

Don’t misunderstand me. Yes, we want our students to memorize Bible verses and learn to recite all 66 books of the Bible. Yes, we want them to know the difference between King Saul in the Old Testament and Saul-who-became-Paul in the New Testament. And of course, we’d love for them to be able to retell the great Bible stories of Esther and David and Moses.

Yet teaching children in Children’s Ministry involves more than filling their heads with information – even the great information from the Bible. Actually it involves much more than teaching. It’s really about reaching the child. Reaching deep down into the heart of the child – touching him or her with the love of Christ.

So yes, we teach the children in our classes, but we also seek to reach these young ones with the message of Christ – that they are valuable and precious. That they were created by a loving God who wants a relationship with them.

In order to reach the children that enter our church’s classrooms, we must view ourselves as more than teachers. We are advocates for our children, encouraging them to be their best selves and encouraging them to love Jesus, themselves and others.

Please come back tomorrow for Part 2.

How does your ministry advocate for children from hard places? Please share with our community by leaving a comment below.

Carla Adair Hendricks is a pastor’s wife, mother of four, writer, speaker and orphan advocate. Two of her four children are biological, one was adopted from Russia, and one was adopted domestically. Her husband Anthony leads the Conway campus of the ethnically-diverse Mosaic Church of Central Arkansas, where she serves the Mo Kids Children’s ministry as a teacher and teacher-coordinator for the K through 1st grade class. She also serves two orphan care ministries: The CALL and the African-American Church Initiative of the Christian Alliance for Orphans. A published journalist, Carla’s shares her heart at adoptionfostercareadvocate.blogspot.com and carlaadairhendricks.blogspot.com.

Get the Wiggles Out! Parachute Play in KidMin

02/18/201402/18/2014 Kathie Phillips

I made the preschool teachers in our kidmin very happy this past Sunday when I let them know that I had ordered a play item for each of their classrooms – parachutes! In fact, I ordered them because one of our volunteers asked me to a few weeks prior – and that was a very simple request to fulfill!

I ordered two different sizes, both from Oriental Trading. We ordered this one for our 2-yr olds and this one for our 3-5-yr olds.

I gave my volunteers a few suggestions on how to use the parachutes and I thought I’d post them here as well:

When you raise the parachute, call two names, have the children run under the parachute and exchange spots.
Have the children repeat the Bible verse or main point while bouncing a soft ball on the parachute.
Use the parachute as a tent to sit in while telling the Bible story.
Speaking of the Bible story – have the children act out the ‘water’ in water-themed Bible stories.
Call two names at a time and have them run under the parachute and change places.

For additional ideas, check out Tony Kummer’s post over at ministry-to-children.

How do you incorporate parachute play into your ministry?

Edible Olympic “Torch”

02/05/201402/05/2014 Kathie Phillips 2 Comments

Last summer, our VBS attenders made edible torches for snack – they fit our “Athens” theme. I thought I’d share them again, considering the 2014 Winter Olympics is right around the corner.

What you’ll need:

Sugar cones
Yogurt (I believe we used vanilla)
Strawberries (although any red fruit would work)

What you’ll do:

Scoop yogurt into a sugar cone – the cone will be the ‘torch’ base.
Top yogurt with strawberries – this will be the ‘flame’.

*You could also add mandarin orange slices to give the ‘flame’ an orange glow.

Are you incorporating any Olympic-inspired snacks into your home or kidmin this weekend?

{Guest Post}: Four Lessons I Learned While Reviewing Sunday School Curriculum

11/29/201311/29/2013 Kathie Phillips

Note from Kathie: Today’s post, written by Jackie Jamison, who blogs over at Sunday School Helper.

After two years of haphazardly trying to find curriculum for my elementary Sunday School class without much success, I decided to create a website to help others in my position by providing independent reviews of the major Sunday School curricula on the market today. Sunday School Helper, a curriculum review website, was born. Through the process of reviewing over 35 curricula, here are the top four lessons that I’ve learned about Sunday School curriculum.

Most Sunday School curriculum is better than you think.

When I started reviewing curriculum, I was skeptical about the quality of most Sunday School curricula. But when I systematically immersed myself in studying curriculum, I found a lot of material that was genuinely interesting, age-appropriate and biblically sound. There were only a few that I genuinely didn’t like. It occurred to me that God really is invested in teaching the next generation and has given a lot of people who really love Him the passion and creativity to write curriculum. A lot of the Sunday School curriculum out there is better than you think.

All curriculum will appear hard to use at first.

It takes a surprising amount of time to make sense of sample materials. This is because it’s hard to absorb a new curriculum format. ANY curriculum will appear hard to use at first. Even curricula that are not designed to be used digitally will appear very cumbersome if you’re evaluating them on the computer. Most curricula have lessons with numerous pages (over 10 pages per lesson is not uncommon). This is a lot of material to sort through in a meaningful way. Curriculum is not written to be easy to evaluate—it is written to be easy to teach.

All curriculum requires work to implement—but not that much.

I ran across one curriculum from Group that is literally open-the-box-and-go (which is convenient for a volunteer but makes the quality of the curriculum suffer), but aside from that, all Sunday School curriculum is going to take work to implement. Some will need more modification to work for your group—but there is no such thing as a curriculum you don’t need to customize. It requires work to translate a curriculum to your teaching style, and it requires time to prepare your heart to teach. With that said, I found most mainstream curriculum was designed to be easy to prepare, and there weren’t lots of differences in how time-consuming the prep work was.

Writing your own curriculum is probably not the best option long-term.

According to the Barna Research Group, 18% of churches write their own curriculum. I was in this category, too, until I saw the high-caliber of curricula on the market. There are great reasons to write your own lessons sometimes, but over the long haul it takes an enormous amount of time that in many situations could be better used customizing something that’s pretty good to make it great. With such great options on the market, that have already taken into account different learning styles, and systematically covering the whole Bible, and testing activities to know what will be effective, I have decided to write my own curriculum a lot less.

If you need help finding Sunday School curriculum, read my reviews at Sunday School Helper. I have profiled almost 40 of today’s major Sunday School curricula, and have broken down curriculum by cost, age group, translation, level of creativity, level of depth, and much more.

I am the mom of two young kids, and the director of my church’s children’s ministry. I have been working with children and youth in Sunday School and Christian camp settings for over ten years. I am a freelance writer with a background in natural resource planning and live near Charlottesville, Virginia.