100 Best Ideas to Turbocharged your Preschool Ministry (13 page)

—Barbara

It happened more than 15 years ago, yet I remember it as if it were yesterday.
I was a brand-new pastor, and one of my preschool teachers was going to be out of town on Sunday.
None of our substitutes were available, so I decided to cover the preschool ministry myself.
I thought,
How hard can this be? Three-year-olds are really cute and seem harmless. This will be a blast.
Somehow my mind pictured a room full of well-behaved preschoolers who’d sit “criss-cross applesauce” in a semicircle, eager to study the Bible and participate in the activities of the day.
So although I studied the curriculum, for some unknown reason I didn’t think through how to engage the kids and manage the classroom.

As you can imagine, it was a train wreck.
I couldn’t get little Joey’s attention long enough to get him to stop playing with trucks.
Suzie wouldn’t stop dancing around the room like a ballerina.
And every time I gave the kids instructions, Billy told me, “That’s not the way we do it.”

Exasperated and at the end of my rope, I finally asked Billy, “If it’s not the way, please I’m begging you to show me how you do it.”

Immediately, he flashed the lights and started the kids in a chorus of “Clean up, clean up, everybody everywhere.
Clean up, clean up, everybody do your share.”
And to my surprise, they did it.
Then the entire group gathered around for circle time.
Billy told the kids, “If you can hear my voice, clap two times.”
They did it again!
Then he looked at me and said, “Okay, Pastor Eric, you may teach us the Bible now.”
Needless to say, that experience taught me more about engaging preschoolers than everything I learned in all my seminary training.

If you want to effectively teach the Bible, engage your kids, and manage your preschool ministry, then you need to establish weekly traditions and regular routines.
I learned from little Billy that preschoolers like predictability.
They want to know what’s next and what’s expected of them.
Establishing routines and traditions helps provide structure and continuity for everyone.

As you think through ways to implement traditions and routines in your preschool ministry, consider the following:

Provide verbal and nonverbal cues to help preschoolers learn appropriate behavior.
This could be a song, a rhyme, or any other experience that’s used in a predictable and repeated pattern over time to set expectations in your preschool ministry.

Use routines to signal transition times.
Many preschoolers struggle with transitions.
They find it hard to move from one experience to another in a timely manner.
Traditions and routines serve as reminders that it’s time to stop one activity and move on to the next.

Remain consistent in using traditions and rituals.
Be willing to stick with it until your preschoolers get it.
This means you’ll need to repeat rituals over and over again until kids understand and respond.

Routines and traditions will keep your preschool ministry running smoothly.
They help set expectations, provide continuity, smooth transitions, and engage your kids so you can effectively communicate God’s Word.

—Eric

In Jesus’ parable of the mustard seed, he asks two questions that have huge ramifications for our approach to preschool ministry: “What is the kingdom of God like?
How can I illustrate it?”(Luke 13:18).
The answers to these questions define our role as preschool ministry leaders who genuinely impact children’s lives.
They teach us to be seed planters and kingdom illustrators.

Seed Planters
—When describing the kingdom of God, Jesus says, “It is like a tiny mustard seed that a man planted in a garden”(Luke 13:19a).
The first principle is this: We’re called to be seed planters.
The problem is that seed-planting results take time to show up.
We’d much rather build programs than plant seeds.
But when we plant the seeds of the kingdom of God in preschoolers’ lives, those seeds can grow into mighty trees of faith.
At our church we focus on planting two vital seeds that introduce preschoolers to God.

• God is our creator. Knowing that God is our creator teaches preschoolers to praise God for all that he has made. This helps them understand that they’re not here by accident but that God has “wonderfully and fearfully made” them. Because God is our creator, he’s worthy of our trust and obedience.
  
• God loves us. For our preschoolers to love God, they must know the love of God. Not only did God create the world, but “God loved the world so much that he gave his one and only Son” (John 3:16). Preschoolers need to know that they can have a relationship with God through Jesus.
  

Kingdom Illustrators
—Illustrators bring words to life by painting pictures that engage us in the story.
To become kingdom illustrators, we need to bring biblical truth to life for the preschoolers at our church.

• Large group worship experience—Our large group programming is designed to engage preschoolers through video, lights, sound, creative worship, storytelling, puppets, and drama to make a lasting impression on their lives. Each week includes a time where children express their love for who God is and praise God for all he has created.
  
• Small group environments—After the large group worship experience, preschoolers take part in a small group environment that’s designed to help them apply God’s Word to their lives. We reinforce the Bible story of the day through wild and wiggly experiences and meaningful connections with their friends and adult leaders.
  

We illustrate the kingdom by painting the picture of Scripture on the canvas of our kids’ lives.
We plant the seeds—and God grows them for a lifetime.

—Eric

Ever been trapped in a boring situation where every second seemed like an eternity?

I remember two teachers at church when I was a child.
They were equally boring.
While one taught, the other one slept through the lesson, and vice versa.
Wow...you can imagine how torturous it was for a young child.

Dé-jà vu
—If you have more than one service on weekends, you probably face a dilemma: What about children who are there for more than one service because their parents attend one service and serve during the other?
Many times kids have to go through preschool ministry again, which can lead to boredom, behavior issues—and dread.
It’s often the children of your most committed families who suffer.
What should you do?

Boredom antidote
—A few years ago, we got frustrated with this issue and came up with Kids’ Place—a solution that’s worked great for us.

Kids’ Place is a room where kids can go when they’re at church during a second service.
Kids’ Place doesn’t have a structured lesson or schedule.
It’s a place where children can just hang out.
Kids can choose from a variety of activities such as coloring, puzzles, crafts, board games, building blocks, video games, books, and more.
We also provide snacks and drinks.

Children look forward to going to Kids’ Place for their second service, and parents love it.
It also helps us enlist many more volunteers.
Some parents in your ministry may not be serving because they don’t want their children sitting through the same experience twice.
But when you provide a room like Kids’ Place for their children, parents will be a lot more willing to serve.
The time you spend enlisting volunteers for Kids’ Place will be multiplied many times over by new volunteers who join your team because you offer it.

We want children to leave our services wanting more.
We want them excited about coming back.
A room like Kids’ Place can be a key factor in making this happen.

—Dale

Clearly the times are changing—but what’s the best way to reach preschoolers?
The kids in our ministries are Digital Natives, children who’ve grown up with computers, the Internet, mobile phones, and MP3s as daily features in their lives.
Rather than steering clear of technology in our preschool ministries, we need to use it to our advantage to relate to these children.
But does this mean we need to replace books, games, and storyboards with video screens?
Yes...and no.
At our church we’ve adopted a high tech/high touch approach to preschool ministry.

High Tech
—Our preschool department incorporates a lot of technology into our Sunday morning programming.
Our preschool assembly room is equipped with state-of-the-art lighting, sound, and video equipment.
Technology helps us add variety to our preschool ministry.
The use of multimedia helps us engage our kids and get our message across to them in a relevant way.
Video and sound effects help us appeal to preschoolers’ sense of fun and excitement.

For example, when we taught our kids about Jesus calming the storm, instead of simply telling the story, we created a “storm” for our preschool large group experience.
We used our light board to emulate lightning and sound effects to create thunder.
We also used video of a thunderstorm on our projection screen.
When Jesus calmed the storm, our video and sound effects changed as well.

High Touch
—Believe it or not, we still use flannel graphs in our preschool ministry.
However, we use them in our small group settings.
We don’t use flannel storyboards to teach the lesson, but we do allow preschoolers the opportunity to interact with each other and manipulate the storyboards in small group.

The majority of our preschool programming isn’t based around the use of technology.
The majority of our preschool programming is life on life; it’s personal.
It’s built around small groups of preschoolers interacting with
volunteers.
We want preschoolers to build relationships and connect with each other and their adult leaders.
Technology can’t take the place of real volunteers interacting with real children.

Technology isn’t a substitute for hands-on experiences with preschoolers.
Dramatic play, crafts, circle time, and games are as essential as video in making God’s Word relevant to preschoolers.

Technology and traditional methods of reaching preschoolers are
both
useful in initiating creativity, encouraging participation, and engaging our kids.

—Eric