October 15, 2019 By Brian Dembowczyk

5 Steps to Getting Comfortable with the Gospel Project for Kids Curriculum

I have moved around quite a bit in my life—perhaps more than I would have wanted. I also travel often for my job, meaning I am always adjusting to new places. If you have moved or travel much, you know what it take to settle into a new place and get your bearings. You need to find where stores and restaurants are, learn street and place names, discover the fastest and best routes around, and more.

Starting a new curriculum is a lot like that. You need to figure out what resources you have available, where they are located, how to use them best, and more. It can be a steep learning curve, one that can be stressing and frustrating because you want to serve your kids, families, and leaders well. When I have moved or traveled, connecting with someone to help me get my bearings has always been a great help. I want to be that guy for you with The Gospel Project for Kids, so here is a five-step plan to settling into The Gospel Project.

Here’s the thing though: it takes time to get acclimated with a new resource. I know time is precious. I know you are busy. But trust me, if you invest adequate time now on the front end and get familiar with all this resource offers you, it will pay off with huge dividends in the long run, both in terms of ministry effectiveness and time and effort it will save you later. So block off a couple of hours, or an afternoon, pour a hot cup of coffee, roll up your sleeves, and let’s dive in.

Step 1: Get acclimated with gospelproject.com

You might be surprised that I suggest getting familiar with this website before the material itself, but let me explain. First, you are already here reading this blog, so why not take some time now and see all that this site has to offer. Second, this website has a wealth of helpful content to help you with both the higher “10,000 foot view” of The Gospel Project as well as the lower “in the weeds view.”

Here are the four key pages, articles, and tools I suggest you focus on:

• The (Literal) A-to-Z of The Gospel Project for Kids. This page may be overwhelming, but it kind of needs to be. It is a fairly exhaustive list of many of the key terms and resources that are critical to The Gospel Project for Kids. Feel free to read through it or peruse it, but you would surely want to bookmark this page, and perhaps print it out, to use as a reference as you explore this curriculum in the following steps.
• The Getting Started Page. As the name suggests, this is a great page with tons of helpful resources to getting started with this curriculum. Definitely take some time and click through the various resources shared through it. This is a page you may want to refer to on a semi-regular basis as well, so consider bookmarking it. Or, you can find it under the “Leader Resources” portion of the site menu at the top of the page. (That menu option is one you want to focus on.)
• The Additional Resources Page. You will use this page, located under the “Leader Resources” menu option regularly. While many items provided on this page are also in other places (such as the Activity Printables), some (such as the Share Squares) are not.
• The Shop button. The easiest way to order what you need for the next quarter is to set up a recurring order at lifeway.com. The second easiest way is the Shop button on this site. No matter what page you are on, if you scroll up to the very top of the page, you will see SHOP. Click that, and then select Kids or Preschool (it doesn’t matter). That will then move you to part of the page where you can see all of the Volumes available for purchase. Select the one you need, and bam!—it takes you to the store page at lifeway.com where you can easily add items into your shopping cart.

Step 2: Get acclimated with the content

OK, now that you have your general bearings, it is time to check out the content itself. I suggest two steps to this:

• Look through all of the resources provided.
  • If you purchased a printed leader kit: Set aside the Leader Guides, Activity Page(s), and cards for now. You will look at them in Step 2. For now, pay attention to the Download Code Card and the three discs.
    • Start with the Enhanced CD. Put that into your computer drive. The “CD” part of this disc is the music that should have started playing or triggered a music playing program to open. You could put this disc into a CD player and it plays music like any ordinary CD. The “Enhanced” part is available on your computer though. A viewer should have opened for you to navigate through a bunch of printable items on this disc. (Or, you can use your file manager to access them.) Basically, if you need to print it, it is on this disc (Especially true starting with Volume 5 of the current cycle. Some printable items before that might be on the Presentation Files Disc.) Notice that some of these files, such as the Activity Printables, are on the Additional Resources page here too. So you will have a choice of how you prefer to access them and/or share them with your team.
    • Now, move onto the DVD. Plop that in your computer drive (or DVD player) and click through the menus to see the videos available to you. This is where you will find all of your playable videos.
    • Next, put the Presentation Files Disc in your computer drive. Open each folder to see that you have MP4 versions of those same videos you just saw on the DVD as well as JPG versions of the posters you saw on the Enhanced CD.
    • Finally, look at that Download Code Card. This is simply an alternative way to get the exact same videos you just looked at on the Presentation Files Disc. This is designed for when a computer does not have a disc drive. Notice this is a one-time download, meaning you can only access them online once. But once they are on your computer, you can share them as you would the MP4 files on the Presentation Disc (such as a password protected platform like Dropbox or Google Drive).
  • If you purchased a digital bundle: Go into My Curriculum Manager (MCM) and visually divide your screen into two halves—a top and a bottom. The top half should have a bunch of green buttons. The bottom half collapsible unit and session menus.
    • Everything in the bottom half is in the top half. Those green buttons allow you to download zip files and organize and share content any way you want outside of MCM. Download each of those zip folders, and take some time to look through each. Open all of the various sub folders and look at the PDFs/MP4s/etc. to see what they are.
    • Now, look to the left of the page and you will see the “menu” with a few resources that are for the entire volume and then links to each unit’s content.
    • Go back to the bottom half of the page now and expand the unit and session menus. Take a few minutes and scroll through the list of items. There are a lot, but we try to keep them in the same order from volume to volume, so you will get used to finding them more quickly.
• Now, it is finally time to look through a Leader Guide—what you may have thought would have been your first stop:
  • Grab a Leader Guide (or open a PDF) and look through a session. Every session is structured the same way, so once you get the structure of one, you are golden for all of them.
  • Walk through each part, being sure to notice the margin notes. Don’t ignore them! They are critical, because they often explain how the other resources fit into a session. So, for example, you will notice pretty early the margin note for the Activity Page. Grab that page or open that PDF to see what that is and how it works into the session. You will also see the videos and activity printables listed in the margins as well as other supplies you would need for activity options.
  • Hopefully, after walking through a session, you will get a feel for how it works, what parts might need to be tweaked and what, if any, parts you might need to skip.

You can also take a few minutes and review everything in the kit with this video:

Step 3: Develop a plan

Now that you are familiar with all of the resources available, where to find everything, and what a session is like, it is time to develop a plan. Basically, that comes in two steps:

• Determine how you will adapt the sessions and the content for your context.
• Determine how you will get resources into the hands of your teachers and leaders. If you purchase a digital bundle, will you invite them into MCM, or will you pull content out and share it another way? If you purchase print materials, how will your teachers access the Activity Printables, videos, and so forth? Think through the best plan that is highly effective and that does not burden you too greatly.

Step 4: Share the plan

This should go without saying, but you would be surprised how many teachers reach out through our social media and chat bot here not knowing where to find what they need to teach. Think through everything—everything!—your teachers and leaders will need and communicate the plan for them to get it each week and/or volume. Share about the pages on this site you find helpful that they might want to know about too, perhaps most notably, the session blog posts and leader training videos.

Step 5: Execute the plan and adapt as needed

And you thought you were done! Not quite. Even the best of plans often need to be adapted, so be on the lookout for ways to improve your plan or blips that pop up that you didn’t expect. Work solutions for those and shar any revisions with your team. In general, expect it to take at least two volumes to settle into a plan that is most effective for you.

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