Tips for Online Sunday School

It’s not an ideal situation to be in - where you can’t safely teach kids in Suday School face to face. You can’t see if they’re engaging with you, activities are tricky to organise and impossible to supervise and it’s hard to ask or answer questions - a staple for Sunday Schools!

I’ve written, prepared and filmed somewhere over thirty online Sunday School lessons now - including a few in German which I’m still not fluent in - and, through trial and error, I’ve worked out some important questions to ask myself as I prepare.

For the Story

• Where does this happen? Who is there? What has just happened? What is about to happen?

• What is the main point of the passage? (You can find more detail on this step in my ‘How to …’ guide)

• What apects of the Bble passage need to be focussed on to get this main point across? (And if it’s a long passage what can you leave out without altering the story while still supporting the point?)

• How can you best tell the story? Reading the text (from the Bible or a kids Bible), acting it out, with pictures, with playmobile or lego figures? Write with the best possible method in mind and then work out how to make it happen afterwards.

For the Talk

• Would the youngest child watching be able to hear and understand the main point?

• For older children how can you break the main point into smaller sections?

• Can you predict any problems or difficulties with this message? If so help them to deal with them now.

• What would you like them to change in their life as a result hearing this main point? Tell them and ask them about how it might look in their lives.

For Prayers, Songs and Activities.

• Do they relate to your text and support the main point?

• Can they be done without requiring special equipment?

• Do they need parents help? How can you support parents in this?

Many, many prayers for you in producing online teaching for kids - you can check out the Digital Sunday School lessons I’ve made here:
Series 1: Healing
Series 2: You Can Trust God because

Feel free to use them as they are, to watch them for inspiration before making your own, or to edit the sections you need into your own videos. Happy Teaching!

Important questions

Filming the first lesson in a new series of the Digital Sunday School this week had me rather distracted by the ‘how’ questions. How do I film my hands without a tripod? How do I make what I’m saying visually translate on to the screen? How can I make this homemade camera phone bipod stable and not casting an awkward shadow? How do I include a diverse representsion of who Christians are in this project? How will I be able to make more than one video a week? How have I lost [insert whatever I needed at that moment] again?!

To balance the self-centered and panic inducing ‘How’ questions I decided to write myself a list of important questions that I should focus on first when preparing a lesson. Yes, those how questions still need answering. But having a list like this puts them in their proper place; at the bottom of my to do list.

• Does what I’m preparing come from the Bible or from my own head?

• Is the gospel on display?

• What does God want to teach me in this?

• How can I say this in a way that a range of kids will understand?

• What are the challenges of this text?

• Am I glorifying God or myself?

• Will this build up the church, locally and worldwide?

These are probably not the only things I should be thinking about but it’s certainly a good place to start. I also have 10 steps to prepare a passage for teaching which I find helpful in prioritising these kinds of questions as well.

Preparation, Preparation, Preparation

I’m deep in the preparation phase for the next series of Digital Sunday School. It’s all colour-coded charts and notes about notes at the moment. It should coalesce into at least one video before next Sunday…

So I wrote up my 10 steps to preparing a passage. This is not, obviously, an inerrant guide, but it is one that helps me to centre what the Bible is saying and not my own agenda. I hope it helps you too, whether you’re preparing to tach a Sunday school class, make a video, do a Bible study with a friend, preach or lead a small group.