A Fly on the Wall

How would you like to spend one Sunday as a fly on the wall of a Sunday school class? Would you like to see another teacher at work? Do you want to know how others deal with difficult kids? Complex curriculum? Challenging questions? I’d like you to come into my classroom on Sundays and see what I do. I’m not the world’s greatest teacher, but I do have a wide variety of students, multiple ages, and family complexities in my little community church in Burlington Washington. Starting today I’m going to write about my Sunday school classes, the challenges and the joys of the weekly experience. I’ll give you an insight on how I prepare, the answers I give, how I prepare and modify my curriculum and classroom management skills per the needs of my kids.
Just so you know, I am the Children’s Director for a non-denominational church. I have about 90 kids, ranging from toddlers through junior high over three services. I have five classrooms, a paid staff of five, and multiple volunteers that work with our kids.
I use Foundations Publishing curriculum for our preschool program, KidsFaith Children’s church for you elementary Kids, and Scripture Sleuth Books for our upper elementary/middle school boys small group. All of our classes are multi-age with boys and girls mixed. I have families from all income brackets, kids with learning disabilities, behavioral issues, in foster care, and those broken families. We have many more boys than girls, our largest group is our early elementary with roughly half of all the students we care for.
So, with that background, here we go!
I’m busy today preparing for Sunday. We are teaching Salvation all this month, and we need to review. I usually teach Salvation in August, it is a good wrap up for the year of learning; we start fresh with a new topic in September. I guess I’m still following the school calendar from my public school teaching days. In any case, I introduced Salvation last week, the first two services went well with my seasoned teacher Heather at the helm. I always teach during the third, and last, service to keep my ideas fresh and my mind firmly planted in the trenches with my staff.
It was a difficult day. That day was the reason I began this line of thinking in this blog. I could tell as soon as Heather left to go to service that it was going to be challenging. First, my music people were running late. They usually begin “kids worship” right away while I clean up the now trashed classroom, but on this day, they were nowhere to be seen. A new girl, who wasn’t fond of talking, arrived and looked uncomfortable. While I tried to introduce myself and get her engaged in one of the many activities set out, a set of very difficult boys appeared, followed by another set of difficult boys. My kids, tired and grumpy from hours now at church, plopped down on the couch and began to complain. Still no noise from the new silent child, but thankfully a kind member of our church (a friend of this child’s mom) got her working on a craft. The difficult boys, now numbering six, roamed restlessly knocking over legos and dominos. A few more kids arrived including a visiting girl from California who has been with us all summer and has never spoken (why don’t girls speak? I question while trying to engage the restless boys in a game of twister.) Finally, my music people show and we gather the kids on the couches to sing. Two of my most difficult begin to fidget and poke one another. That quickly escalates to slapping and fighting (as a disclaimer- these kids are pseudo siblings, one adopted and one foster kid in the same house.) I immediately separate them, pulling the one I know more close to my side while singing, “Father, I adore you.” He sulks and pulls away. I let him go and remind another child that God loves to hear him sing. He is humming loudly a song I don’t recognize. The music time continues like this with me tag teaming between resistant singers until all five songs were finished. I had been smart enough when the kids began to arrive that day to quickly dream up a “hands on” activity for them to do while I’m explaining the joys of Salvation. After the singing I hand them each a Popsicle stick cross and skein of yarn to wrap around the stick (that nifty craft from the 60s and 70s that ends up making a cool looking diamond.
The group is overall intrigued with the concept of winding yarn, some are better than others at the task, and they all get to work while I begin to shoot questions at them about Salvation. “What is Salvation?” I ask while helping the most difficult with the purple yarn. None of them could answer, which disturbs me because we’ve been over this ground before, they should know. So I make the question easier. “What does God want from you?” Their answers are far from what I want to hear: to listen, to obey, to go to church, to give money. I sigh, but press on, “Not quite, what does God want from you?” I ask again. Sensing they are way off, they get more creative: to love others, read our Bible, be nice. “Those are all good things to do, but what does God want from you?” I ask a third time like it’s the first: with much enthusiasm. They stare at me blankly. I finally resign to the inevitable and just tell them, “God wants to have a relationship with you.” Then I ask them again, “What does God want from you?”
My daughter dully says, “To have a relationship with me.”
“That’s right!” Then I move from child to child and ask them individually the question again. One by one, they reply: a relationship. At least I accomplished one thing. Later I wrote it down and put it on the wall. For the next four weeks I’ll review that. I couldn’t get to the part about how we ask Jesus into our hearts, or how Salvation changes our lives, I just have to be happy with the fact that each of them now knows that God wants a relationship with them. This was a good day to remind me that you cannot teach kids without understanding where they are right now. I have to check for knowledge before I can teach something new. It also reminds me that I have to stick to the basics. Realistically, I only have about 10 minutes with this group to really teach. I didn’t get to read the Bible story, or verses, or connect anything with their lives, I was too busy trying to teach one concept, albeit, the most important concept in their lives, but still that was all I could do that day.
Now, back to this coming Sunday, I’ll review our concept: God wants to have a relationship with us, and then tell them how that happens (through the saving grace of Jesus Christ.) I’ve got curriculum as my backbone, but meanwhile I’m trying to think of an additional hands on activity for this group for Sunday. I’ll let you know what I come up with.