I have recently started leading regularly at our Junior Church. When I began, we were using materials which were tailored to a narrow age range and which were tied to the lectionary and sometimes seemed to miss the point of the passage.
Since our group has an age range of 3-14 and we don’t follow the lectionary in church, we have now switched to using On The Way for 3-9s. Although this still misses the top age range we have, it caters for a greater number of the children, and also enables us to design our own programme of teaching.
On The Way has excellent craft resources and helps you to get into the passage you’re teaching yourself. It doesn’t, however, always help you to prepare the teaching of the passage very easily. At the moment we are doing a little series on some of the kings of Judah, which has been great for me as some of the passages were unfamiliar to me, let alone to the kids!
So to help me to tell the stories of some of the passages (and to source some good colouring pages for less well-known stories) I now turn to Deaf Missions – their daily reading notes are available online and give some excellent short summaries of bible passages together with clear black and white illustrations which blow up very well for colouring in. Check out their page on Jehoshaphat and Ahab to see what I mean.
I always like to have a colouring page and a wordsearch for the children – sometimes I like to get them to colour in a picture as I explain the bible passage, as it can help with concentration. And it’s always useful to have something up your sleeve in case the Vicar preaches too long and you’re in Junior Church for an unplanned extra ten minutes.
DLTK have a good selection of colouring pages. For wordsearches I tend to go to Calvary Church‘s site first – they also have colouring pages on many passages and other word puzzles, although the bible version they use (possibly the American Standard?) doesn’t usually mesh with the readings we use, so I don’t use the more complex puzzles. If the passage isn’t in the Calvary Church curriculum, I go to Teachers Direct, where you can make your own wordsearches – cool, eh? Unsurprisingly I used this when teaching about Jehoshaphat.
Do you have any favourite online places for Sunday School resources? Do share!
The Vicar's Wife 
The Kingsquad resources on http://www.familytrust.org.uk are excellent. There is a theme each term and the material can all be easily downloaded and printed off. It includes a lesson plan, ideas for games & crafts, a worksheet – everything you need for the session. I have school years 4-6 in my group and I have found that these cover all the ages quite well and I can use it to plan my session quite painlessly!
I often check out the Good Book Company’s Bible reading notes for children – xtb and Table Talk. Long Story Short family devotions by Marty Machowski is also worth a look at.
Children’s Bible Activities (www.bibleactivities.com) has various crafts, snacks, worksheets ideas – some good, some not so (although there is a yearly cost).
Check out these 2 posts by Jared Kennedy at Sojourn Kids that evaluates a number of curriculum’s from the US – http://sojournkids.com/2011/05/curriculum-faqs-if-you-werent-using-gospel-story-what-would-you-be-using-the-top-7/ and http://sojournkids.com/2011/05/curriculum-faqs-why-are-you-using-the-gospel-story-curriculum-by-new-growth-press/
‘the Vicar preaches too long’ – is this possible?
Hiya, hope you are well.
Thanks for a very interesting post. I like to use scriptures union material, or a website called http://www.sermon4kids.com as they always have a colouring page, and different material. Nicky
Thanks for the comments everyone and the great links. I’ve used sermons4kids.com myself – it’s great, but is lectionary based (as is the SU stuff) so not so good if you’re teaching less usual passages but useful for colouring pages and puzzles.
vicarvernon – of course it’s never possible for the Vicar to preach too long! Perhaps I should have worded that ‘the Vicar preaches longer than anticipated’ 🙂