Good morning, Pastor Bo 🙂
Thank you for helping me with this Sunday school item. We are truly in need of some volunteers. Bear with me and let me share with you what we do.
We work as a team (2 bodies – safe church policy) plus there are two stations per rotation.
Week 1 is Storytelling and Arts/Crafts
Week 2 is Spiritual Practices and Games
Week 3 is Missions and Science
Week 4 is Cooking. We did add Music to this rotation; Luke has stepped down. Would love to add it back in but Cindy and Cheryl have done cooking from the beginning and the extra time allows for cooking and eating.
Each team shares the time with each taking about 20 minutes to do their lesson. Example: Esther has storytelling so she will teach her lesson first which involves the bible story and key / focus bible verse with activities. Then Kim and/or Heather do their arts and crafts lesson. We all have extra worksheets that go with the monthly theme that we can use if time allows.
We use the Deep Blue Sea curriculum. It consist of the stations I listed above. We work on a four-week rotation; each team teaches once every four weeks. We can’t say once a month because that periodic 5th Sunday messes that up. It is an easy program: the lessons are written out and it even tells you what to say and what to ask the children! It gives a list of the materials you may need for your lesson, and it includes worksheets for you to use. It tells you how to teach it and gives examples to get you started. We all love it. This Sunday, 3/3, starts a new theme: The People Welcome Jesus – story of Jesus’s ride into Jerusalem. The children learn about this story through the 7/8 stations.
We have lost our week 2 rotation team due to personal and family matters therefore they needed to step down. Gwen and I have talked and one solution we came up with is to find at least one person who will take my science station which will free me up to step into the week 2 rotation; I really should have someone else (2 adults). We can always use more; would love to add music back into the cooking rotation.
Qualifications? A love of children, ability to follow a script, creativity, patience – there is a range of ages from 6 to 12; we often get the older children to help the younger ones 🙂
Thank you and God Bless,
Love,
Linda