Sunday School or Sunday's Cool

This is my day four post for the "31 days of blogging in October" challenge.  I am blogging 31 days of Children's Ministry.  To find links to all the other days (as they get posted) go to DAY 1.  Today I am just going to share links to some bible props and costumes that I have shared in the past.

Here in the UK when most churches refer to Sunday School they are talking about children's classes that happen either during the main meeting or straight after it.  Unlike in American churches that sometimes also have adult classes for Sunday school.  I have never heard of a church over here that does that.

Our Sunday School currently covers children aged 4 to 11, with toddler toys available for the younger children.  The name Sunday's Cool came about years ago when we were also running a Saturday morning club for Christian and non Christian kids.  We called it Saturday's Wild and one of the team at that time came up with the idea to call what we do with kids on Sunday mornings, Sunday's Cool, to go alongside that.  The name stuck and although the age range has changed slightly, so that it only applies to 7 to 11 year olds now, we are still Sunday's Cool.

Currently we are using temporary materials, while we wait on a decision for other materials.  But those of you in the UK (or anyone else for that matter) might be interested, particularly in smaller churches as these are free to use materials.

I don't believe they are the right choice for my team or the children we minister to, hence them only being a temporary solution.  BUT they might be the right choice for you and your team.  they are from Scripture Union, which is a UK Christian publisher and are an online version of their printed Sunday School materials.

Light Live has materials for a range of age groups, and when you set up your group online you tell it which age group you want to be using.  You can set up multiple groups, and once each of your teachers has registered on the site they can log in and see their lesson.

The lessons are dated as they are in the printed materials BUT if your group doesn't run every week, or you want to skip a particular lesson for any reason, you can change the dates on any of the lessons, which is what I have done as there are two weeks a month we don't meet.

here's the dummy guide I wrote for my team members.  Once you have set your teams up and allocated dates to the lessons (if you ARE changing any of those) this is what they will need to do.

When you log on you should see the following three buttons at the top of the screen.  Groups, Programme and Session.  Click on Programme.

That should bring up the following Sunday's programme, in this case the 16th,

If the current week is not the one you want, scroll down the page and click on the week you DO want.  Which will bring it up, like so:

You then click on Select Activities, one of those three blue buttons on the right.

On the left you will see the overview, telling YOU as teacher what the lesson is ABOUT.  In the middle will be the activities to choose from.  On the right is some further info including the total suggested time for the activities chosen so far.

In the centre section you will see three tabs labelled Switch On, Into the Bible and Living the Life, that's basically the intro activities, the main activities and the conclusion activities. 

You will see that it has some suggested activities in each section already ticked, but you are free to change these as you wish.  Just click on the tick to untick it or click on the blank circle to tick it.  For further details of each activity click on it's tab.

Do that for all 3 sections, (you can have more than one activity in each section, just keep an eye on the suggested time on the right), and remember you won't necessarily do it exactly as listed.  For instance the activity I chose for the main thing had some stuff about the bible timeline.  We just skipped that since we don't have one.  It also had something about making a model, using resources you can click to open.  But honestly they are that, cut this exact thing out and stick tab a to tab b and everyone's thing looks exactly the same and ends up in the bin before they even get out of church type crafts, so  I didn't do that either.  But the rest of it was as I wanted so I ticked that one.

If you want to see if there is anything else, you can type in the search box and look for stuff that way.  I haven't always found that too helpful, but it occasionally comes up with something.

Once you have done that for all 3 sections you will see on the right a list of the things you will need, with links to the downloads.  Then click beneath the search box, on the blue  Compile and Print button.

Then you get to download the extra things you might need (it's up to you whether you do them each as individuals or use the zip file) and it tries to get you to buy the cds or printed copies rather than download copies etc.  You just ignore the bottom bit that tries to get you to buy them and focus on the top.

You then choose the Print session or download session at the top.  I have noticed that the download session seems to insert a blank page in between each activity so you end up wasting a lot of paper.  Although you could always choose to just print the pages you wanted and ignore the blank ones.  It will only print (or download) the activities you have ticked.

I printed it out, then went through and crossed out any PARTS of activities that I wasn't doing.

You will also need to print out the relevant pages of any of the downloads that you need.  Remember you will be photocopying in black and white so feel free to print in black and white (or grey scale) to save on colour ink, unless you particularly want one colour copy to show the children.

If you change your mind, you can come back in and alter the session, and print out a fresh copy of the altered version.

Like I said, it's not the right materials for us, only a temporary measure but this MIGHT help someone else.

You can check out the sites I link up to over in my sidebar. Before you go, why not check out my recipes index page, or my craft projects index page, I am sure you will find something there to interest you.