Rotation Stations With The Gospel Project For Kids

Rotation-Stations-Diagram-Gospel-Project

HOW DOES THE GOSPEL PROJECT WORK WITH THIS ROTATION STATION SYSTEM?

I firmly believe that all curriculums are just tools, and without good people and a good system, these tools will be ineffective. Furthermore, I believe that finding the right system and format that works for your particular church and ministry should be top priority before selecting a curriculum. Then you should find a curriculum that can be used within your system and schedule. The Gospel Project For Kids is not made to work with Rotation Stations. As far as I know, there is no published curriculum that is designed for Rotation Stations because I had never heard of any other church using Rotation Stations before we created this system. Rotation Stations are more similar to a VBS format than the traditional Sunday School format that basically all curriculums follow.

With that said, The Gospel Project For Kids can be made to work with Rotation Stations. You simply have to look at each session in TGP (The Gospel Project) as a series of potential activities and lesson aids that can be pulled out from the curriculum and assigned to different stations and worship services. In other words, you cannot just go by the book and follow TGP exactly because it is not designed for a Rotation Station system.

This also means that one central person or committee must decide where each part of the curriculum should be used and divide up the different parts of the curriculum to the different stations. You cannot simply print or email the entire lesson for the week to every teacher and then expect the teacher to figure it out. That would be confusing, overwhelming and  ineffective with this system. It does put a heavier work load on the central person (typically the children’s minister), while relieving the burden from the volunteers to figure out what to do each week. Volunteers love this because in certain stations they have to do zero prep work before Sunday. They know how their station works and that the materials will be waiting for them in the classroom, and they do not have to stress over their lesson or stay up late on Saturday night scrambling to figure out what they are teaching. This is great for preventing volunteer burnout!

DIVIDING UP THE LESSON MATERIALS TO THE DIFFERENT ROTATION STATIONS

After a few weeks working with The Gospel Project For Kids curriculum, I was able to develop my own weekly system of diving up the lesson ideas and resources to the different stations. It went like this…

PRESCHOOL WORSHIP LESSON IDEAS

I gave our preschool worship leader 1st dibs on preschool materials, and she would look through all TGP preschool lessons for the Unit (3-6 weeks of lessons) and give me a list of all the activities from the curriculum that she wanted to use for each lesson in the Unit. We used the digital TGP curriculum, and she would open up the preschool PDFs and copy and paste the different activities into a new document for each week. I would make a note of which activities she was using and mark those as off-limits for Imagination Station (1 of the Sunday School Rotation Stations) to prevent kids from doing the same activities twice.

IMAGINATION STATION LESSON IDEAS

After I knew which lesson activities were reserved for Preschool Worship, I would go through every leader’s guide for every lesson and find activities that could be potentially used at Imagination Station. This station was where the kids would do crafts, science experiments, games or other fun activities that all reinforce the Bible stories. There were 3 age groups that rotated, and those age groups coincided with the 3 age groups in The Gospel Project For Kids.

  1. Preschool (3-year-olds – Kindergarten)
  2. Lower Elementary (Grades 1-2)
  3. Upper Elementary (Grades 3-5)

To decide what activities would be used at Imagination Station, I would create 3 new documents every week. I would go through the Leader’s Guide PDFs for each of the 3 age groups and copy and paste all potential lesson activities (excluding those activities reserved for preschool worship) into my 3 documents. I would usually try to get a few weeks ahead and create lots of these documents at once.

The TGP Leader’s Guides have lots of material that would not be useful for Imagination Station, so it was necessary to just pull out the relevant portions. Once I got used to the curriculum, I knew exactly what to look for, so I could quickly copy and paste just the parts that might be used at Imagination Station.

Next I would email all my documents with the potential activities for Imagination Station to our main leader at Imagination Station. She had a deadline early in the week (she was good about getting a couple weeks ahead too) to look at the documents I sent her and pick out all the activities she wanted to do with each of the 3 age groups at Imagination Station that week. She would also send me a supplies list.

I would then create another new document that I would print for the Imagination Station room, and this document would have the finalized list of activities/instructions for each of the 3 age groups that would come through that week.

BUYING SUPPLIES

Since I typically knew exactly what supplies were needed for Preschool Worship and Imagination Station by Tuesday (if not earlier), I could then make 1 big shopping trip per week to Wal-Mart, Sam’s Club, Hobby Lobby, etc. to get everything at once. This was also early enough in the week that I could order supplies from Amazon Prime and have them in hand by Thursday. I then had a volunteer who usually came in on Thursday and helped distribute all the supplies to the right rooms.

NARRATION STATION LESSON MATERIALS

Narration Station is where the kids hear the story of God. For each week’s Bible story I would provide a few different items from TGP leader guides, along with my own leader instructions that applied each week. To get a better understanding of exactly what was expected at Narration Station, here is the text (in red) from the 1st page of the Leader Guides I provided for volunteers.

NARRATION STATION LEADER GUIDE

To be ready for Narration Station on Sunday, do the following things:

Study the Bible story closely in a “real Bible.”

Make sure you read the teacher Bible study. This will help you personally connect with the session, which will give you more insight into how to present the material to the kids.

Pray for the kids who will be coming through your station, that they will hear the Word of God clearly, and that it will touch their lives.

Review the leader guide for this week, taking special notice of the differences between the different age groups. Be prepared so that you can fit everything in. If you spend too much time reading through your Leader Guide DURING the stations, then you WILL run out of time.

How will things go on Sunday morning at Narration Station?

As each group comes in, have them get into their seats quickly so you can get into the story. *If you stick very closely to the time slots for each segment of Narration Station, it should take about 18 minutes, so please be aware of how much time to spend on each item. When kids have settled down, you can follow this outline for each group:

  1. Briefly mention the main point from last week’s story. (1 minute)
  2. Read this week’s story to the group. *There are different versions of the story for different age groups. The preschool version is always different. Usually grades 1-2 and grades 3-5 will use the same version of the story. (5-6 minutes)
  3. At the end of the story, share the “Christ Connection” segment. (1 minute)
  4. Ask the 5-6 discussion questions. These are very brief, with short answers just to recap a few things that happened in the story. (3 minutes)
  5. Show the kids the Big Picture Question Poster. Ask the question, and have the whole group answer together. *Preschool has a different poster with a shorter answer. (1 minute)
  6. Show the timeline map poster to the kids and use the discussion guide for each age group to help explain where this story falls on the timeline. (1-2 minutes)
  7. Pass out journals. Follow the discussion guide for each age group to help explain what to write or draw in the journals. (5 minutes)

NARRATION STATION LEADER GUIDE PAGES FROM TGP

After the initial page (red text above), I would provide the following pages of materials, copied and pasted straight from The Gospel Project For Kids leader guides. I would provide one Narration Station leader guide for preschoolers and one leader guide for grades 1-5 (to be shared among 2 different elementary age groups that would come through). I would print all of these pages on cardstock because this was more durable for leaders holding up the various “posters” during small group discussions.

This is what I would put on those pages for Narration Station.

  1. Bible Study Overview / Teacher Bible Study
    • Gives the leader a quick background and overview of the Bible story.
  2. The Bible Story
    • TGP provides 2 versions of the story, 1 for preschool (shorter with easier vocabulary) and 1 for elementary.
  3. Bible Story Picture/Poster
    • Used as a visual aid when telling the story. It also matches various other posters in the classrooms and hallway.
  4. Discuss The Story
    • This page includes 3-7 questions for small group discussion after the kids hear the story. These questions were copied from within TGP leader guides.
    • What you need during small group discussion: timeline poster and map, big picture question poster, journals
    • Discussion begins by showing the timeline map and pointing out today’s story.
    • After small group discussion, journal pages are passed out, and this page gives instructions for what the kids should draw or write on their journal pages.
  5. Big Picture Question/Poster
    • Used during the “Discuss the Story” page above.
  6. Story Timeline/Poster
    • Used during the “Discuss the Story” page above.
  7. Timeline Map/Poster
    • Used during the “Discuss the Story” page above.

COLOR-CODE SYSTEM FOR TGP JOURNAL PAGES & POSTERS

As a part of Narration Station, kids are provided journal pages each week. These journal pages are printed directly from TGP curriculum leader guides. As a part of the way I organized our use of the curriculum, I used a color-code system with 5 different colors. The Gospel Project For Kids actually provides 2 different journal pages for each story. One is the kid journal page, used at Narration Station, and the 2nd is a Family Journal Page, which we passed out to parents to use at home each week. Both of these journals would be printed on the same color paper. This color was also used to print dated posters that I would put in various locations (kids hallway and classrooms). These dated posted let parents and church members know exactly which story we were studying that week, and the color-coding helped me keep all my curriculum materials organized. As you can imagine, I would have lots and lots of stacks of papers and posters to keep organized, especially if I printed out curriculum materials several weeks in advance.

TGP-Family-Resources-Table

Notice the color coordination between the family journals and the dated Bible story posters.

MEMORIZATION STATION WITH THE GOSPEL PROJECT FOR KIDS KEY PASSAGE

The Gospel Project For Kids curriculum provides Key Passages, but they are often longer than a typical memory verse. These key passages however are not just for 1 week, but the same key passage is used for an entire unit (3-6 Bible stories). TGP provides 2 versions of the Key Passage, 1 for preschool and 1 for elementary. TGP gives printable posters with the Key Passage, and it offers these posters in several different translations. We just used the HCSB translation because that better matches the Key Passage songs and other mentions of the Key Passage throughout the curriculum. The 2 main resources provided by TGP to help kids memorize the Key Passage are the posters and the Key Passage song videos. These are helpful, and we used them both at Memorization Station and during both kids worship services. However, we needed more than just these 2 things for Memorization Station.

WHAT ELSE DO KIDS DO AT MEMORIZATION STATION BESIDES SING THE MEMORY VERSE SONG?

The kids would sing 2-3 songs at Memorization Station each week. Besides the Key Passage, they were always working on memorizing the Books of the Bible, so we had song videos for the Old Testament and New Testament.

The Gospel Project For Kids did sometimes offer a few games and ideas for memorizing the key passage, but these activities were often too similar to the types of things they would be doing at Imagination Station and would require yet another list of supplies to gather or buy each week. Instead, I created memory verse word puzzles every week myself. I had already been doing the same thing every week for The Jesus Storybook Bible the year before, and you can download several free samples of the word puzzles I created for The Jesus Storybook Bible by clicking here. The kids would divide into 2 teams and do a key passage word scramble, which included each word printed on a separate half-piece of cardstock. They would race to see which team could put the cards in the right order first. Then each kid would complete his word puzzle, or take it home to complete if time ran out. These word puzzles obviously only work for kids who can read and write, so preschoolers did not do them. Preschoolers mostly just did sang their memory songs and then had a few minutes to play (or maybe eat some Goldfish).

ELEMENTARY KIDS WORSHIP SERVICE MATERIALS FROM TGP

For Elementary Kids Worship Service, I would use the various graphics from The Gospel Project For Kids in my Keynote/Powerpoint presentations. I would also use the Bible Story video and the Key Passage song video. During the teaching segment of Kids Worship, I might use 1-2 activities from TGP leader guide materials, but I always selected my activities after all Imagination Station activities had been selected for the week. Sometimes I would make up my own large group activities when there was nothing from TGP that really helped, but usually I could find something useful in the curriculum to use at Elementary Kids Worship.

HAVE MORE QUESTIONS?

I would love to post samples of the different leader guides I created for each station, but I cannot do that because of copyright law. If you have further questions about using The Gospel Project For Kids with a Rotation Station format in your Sunday morning children’s ministry program, ask in the comments, and I will do my best to answer.