Helping you help teachers!
The following is a post from Cindy Lumpkin, Product Development Specialist at LifeWay, who is using The Gospel Project in her children’s ministry.
Here are some things I do weekly for my children’s ministry team:
1. Pray weekly for each teacher.
2. Arrive early each Sunday so you can check with each class to make sure they have everything they need for the teaching session. This includes a monitors and DVD players, copies, supplies, etc.
3. Prepare a unit supplies list for the start up activities and the small group activities; so that you can make sure it we have the supplies. The supply list is a simple excel with the session number, the session title, date, title of activity and resources need to do the activity. (You can see an example of a Cindy’s supply spreadsheet here.)
4. Schedule a planning meeting with teachers to look over the next Bible studies and activities. This helps ensure your teachers feel prepared and equipped to lead!
At first, I didn’t think that I heard the teachers right when they ask after the first Sunday of teaching The Gospel Project if it would be possible to meet and look over the next unit together. Okay were they actually asking to have a teacher meeting? Isn’t that a thing of the past? The skeptic in me said we’ll see who turns up but I set up a time to meet and wow 8 teachers showed up (6 men and 2 women).
We had great time of discussing stories and sharing insight on the lesson’s coming up. We discussed how to handle Bible stories that the children may have not heard before. We looked at the Bible stories that we had never used with children before. At the end of the meeting, several ask if we could meet again before the next unit. You know, I think that we might just do this again!