What should sunday school look like

He is trying to get your attention and earn your affection by providing you with the answers ahead of time. He feels like this is a place where he is smart and on top, and he wants to showcase that. Recognize his knowledge. She might get her thoughts out more effectively with something to read or stand behind. This kid has a question for everything, and a rebuttal for every point made. This is usually a defense mechanism a child employs because they feel uncomfortable.

Begin teaching a lesson as usual, having your volunteers act out the card they have. Ask for help from others on how to handle the different personalities… You never know, someone in your own family or church may have been that personality when they were little, and they know exactly what you should do to fix it.

The easiest way to convince kids you care about them is to take note of who they are. Ask them:. In subsequent lessons, start out by going around the room and having each child give an answer to a question. When most people think of Sunday School, they think of six children in pretty dresses sitting around a table and reading a passage of scripture…. Bring in props that they can use, or play a fun game with them Minute to Win It! Games are great for Sunday School!

Wherever possible, relate the lesson to something that is near to them. Kids respond more when something feels normal to them—so do whatever you can to make things seem normal. Anything you can do to make your lesson more than just reading and remembering will engage kids. Before your lesson, take about 10 popsicle sticks and write different actions on them. These actions could be jumping jacks, burpees, twirl in a circle, etc. Research has shown that kids learn best in a variety of different ways, and has grouped these different ways into seven categories : verbal words , spatial pictures , kinesthetic movement , musical music , logical reasoning , interpersonal people , and intrapersonal self discovery.

To have a lesson that reaches each child in your classroom, incorporate something in each of these different categories. For instance, say you are teaching a lesson on the Tower of Babel….

A verbal learner will want to read the Bible passage, a spatial learner will want to draw pictures of the story, a kinesthetic learner will want to act out the story, a musical learner may want to make up a song about the story, a logical learner will want to figure out why something happened in the story, an interpersonal learner will want to talk to a small group about the story, and an intrapersonal learner will want to think quietly about the story.

Whichever type of learning you use, the students who learn best within that category will be most engaged. When I teach Sunday School, I try to incorporate each of these types of learning somewhere in the lesson. The more you can convince the kids you care about them, the more they will want to listen to you.

In the midst of convincing and engaging, it can be easy to miss out on the instruction part. Kids will naturally want to spend more time talking about themselves and playing fun games than they will listening to you talk about the Bible. Do your best to make it as interactive as possible, but remember that there is always a point that needs to be made. Before the lesson, identify what the main points are, and create a phrase that you an repeat throughout the lesson. For instance, you might be talking about Feeding the 5,….

You want kids to understand that Jesus worked a miracle when he fed the 5, with just a few pieces of food. Every lesson should end with a time of reflection, and of asking questions to test comprehension.

This is one of the hardest things about having the opportunity to teach Sunday School, but also one of the most important. However, if a child is wrong, he or she should be corrected. However, in this statement, the child is clearly wrong. There are a few different ways you can correct a child without hurting their self-esteem and also validating their bravery. How did you come up with that?

Correcting children not only is beneficial for them to learn, but is also beneficial in gaining the trust of all of the children in the room. They want to know how things apply to real life. Start where they are, then move on from there. Adults want to be engaged intellectually. This is the one audience who can track with you for more than one point. Why does he respond to blasphemy with a question? See what I did there? Apply these audience-specific principles to your Sunday school lesson preparation as you write your lesson plan.

Thinking in this way forces you to always stay on-claim. Putting everything on one page forces you to make eye contact with your students, master your content, and engage your audience face-to-face. We have already said that you should keep it to one point. More than that—one claim.

Often, the very nature of teaching is breaking down a simple concept into multiple more nuanced concepts. Just make sure that you are always explaining how your sub-points relate back to your main point. But with some prep time, I could probably come up with an illustration for every concept I truly understand. People remember pictures, smells, sounds, and stories.

Use those elements as the prime matter of your lesson. Even for complicated topics and texts, speak in vocabulary, concepts, and ways that are as simple as possible. I hate him! Give them something new.

Find a way to make Sunday school fresh, and rescue it from its reputation of being so stale. Just make sure that not all your classes are a sequence or series so that people feel they can come even if they missed a few weeks.

Establish overall conceptual coherence and flow first. It is extremely hard to create coherence and flow from a stream-of-consciousness manuscript. That would be ridiculous. These prompts are intended to give you a starting point for writing your Sunday school lesson plan. They are categories of Sunday school lessons that you can use to build an exceptional one-time lesson, or a short series, depending on what your church audience enjoys.

There are many modern issues which capture the minds and hearts of church members that are ripe for biblical engagement. These issues not only provide stimulating conversation, but will likely draw more people to come to Sunday school in order to hear what the Bible has to say about these important issues.

By digging more deeply into theological issues, you may be serving a demographic that hungers for understanding where they only see mystery. You can help them to gain clarity and resolution about confusing issues at the heart of their faith journeys. Use these principles of audience engagement and lesson planning to build a deeply engaged church audience.

Grow your Sunday school attendance from the lingering faithful few to an eager and lively community of engaged learners. The rich text element allows you to create and format headings, paragraphs, blockquotes, images, and video all in one place instead of having to add and format them individually.

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Paul Maxwell, Ph. Find him at paulmaxwell. Products Learn. Access all Tithe. Login Sign Up Free. Church Signup. Church Growth. Master these audience engagement skills to grow an engaged Sunday school lesson audience without sacrificing depth. Sunday school lessons have a reputation for being dry.

Is that fair? People are more than willing to listen to audio lectures, books, and talks for hours. TEDx talks have billions of views online. Podcasts are currently the largest source of consumed media in the world. Principles The principles we will unpack here are the often overlooked rules that every master communicator follows. Engage and Know Your Audience This is the most important thing.

If you give an adult a lecture, you can basically expect the same thing. Then, adjust accordingly. Now you want to know the answer. Consider yourself Sunday schooled. Are you teaching on a topic or a text? What do a topic and a text have in common? They both contain ideas. Both will require biblical reflection. Both will require conceptual unpacking and application. Aimee Byrd. May 18, As we were sharing our opinions, I realized we were kind of arguing in circles because we did not share the same view of the function of Sunday school.

On the podcast, Todd said that Sunday school in his church is set up in such a way that it makes an impression of the teacher giving exhortation with authority, like it would be done during a worship service. Of course, Sunday school does look very different than it did in its beginnings only a couple hundred years ago.

It was first established in Britain, and eventually spread to the U. They were learning about the Christian faith as they were receiving a basic education. It was certainly not confused with the worship service, even as adults began attending and there was more mature exposition of Scripture. So that raises a lot of questions. Is a Sunday school class equivalent to a worship service? To this, all three of us would agree in the negative.

Should we be setting them up that way? Some do give that feel. He wants someone who is equipped to teach and who is a man, as to not cause confusion. There is a teacher. And that person is teaching from Scripture. Secondly, Sunday school takes place in the same building as the church.