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!
Several weeks as I am preparing for the lesson, there are things that the Preschool Leader Guide says should be on the enhanced CD, but I cannot find them. This week (Unit 3, Session 2), “Then and Now” should be on the enhanced CD (according to the sidebar on page 120 of the leader guide), but it isn’t there. Or am I looking in the wrong place? This is not the first time I have had to skip an activity that looked interesting and/or helpful because the promised resource was not on the CD.
Hank, that actually is a misprint. The “Then and Now” is an activity page that you will find with the Preschool Activity Pages it is not on the enhanced CD. This mistaken reference appears at several places in this print leader guide unfortunately. Sorry if it caused you to skip some activity because the resource was not actually on the enhanced CD. There should be no errors with your enhanced CD.
Thank you; that helps a lot. We did not have the activity pages for the first quarter for some reason, but we do have them for Units 4-6.
I would love to see the link of the spreadsheet but it says that file is not found. Trying to organize supplies for this. 🙂
Sounds like you may have a bad enhanced CD! Give us a call at (866) 627-8553 and we’ll get that taken care of for you!
We have started using the Gospel Project for the fall…but are experiencing some issues. Who can we call for support and feedback? I have a background in Teaching and Curriculum and would like to offer some suggestions from our field users. please advise?
Hey Jacquelin, you can give us a call at (800) 458-2772 or drop an email to me at katie.decillo@lifeway.com and I can get you in touch with someone on our team. Are you having difficulties with the Kids curriculum?