Elevate Jr. Introduction
| Posted in Ministry | Posted on 06-15-2009
4
This past Sunday Morning we made a major change in our Early Childhood areas at Trinity. We have moved to Elevate Jr., and it has been an exciting change for us. We have a specially-designed program for our nursery through 2 year olds that my staff and I wrote, but we have relied on curriculum for 3 year old through Kindergarten. This 3 year old through Kindergarten age bracket is what makes up our Early Childhood area, and it is comprised of 12 individual classrooms over two services (Two 3-year old rooms, two 4-year old rooms, and two 5 & 6-year old rooms) total on a Sunday Morning.
First let me say that I have used Gospel Light’s Movers & Shakers, Group Publishing’s Faithweaver, and some other stuff that I can’t quite remember. I think most of these curriculum’s have some great things going for them, but at our church the alignment of kids being in classrooms and the burden put on our teachers to lead these classrooms has been heavy. I know that every church is different, and every church has unique circumstances that dictate what will and will NOT work. That being said, I was looking for something much different than had been used in the previous 45 years of our church. I have also been using Elevate for our Elementary services over the past two years with some success. The adaptability of the curriculum has been great for us, and what we do would probably differ from what others do.
In Early Childhood, I think I have found something that fits the bill. Because I’m a blogger, and want to milk everything for all it’s worth, I’m going to split this review into 3 categories. First will be How I use Elevate Jr., next What I like about it Elevate Jr., and finally What I don’t like about Elevate Jr.
Are you using Elevate Jr.? I’d love to know how you use it, and what you’ve found to make it more beneficial for your environments? Please, make yourself a part of the conversation! Don’t be a lurker!
————————————
In case you’re wondering what Elevate Jr. is and how to use it (according to their instructions) watch the video’s below. The quality of Elevate Jr. is MUCH better than the quality of these videos!
Looks really cool. I like how the training videos are side by side. That’s one of our hardest things to train–how to show a teacher how to engage the kids with the video the whole time and not jsut sit there. Do the units align with Elelvate at all? I’ve seen some of their product but haven’t ever used it with kids so I look forward to hear what is most effective about it.
Kendra Golden´s last blog ..Romans 10
[...] Earlier I talked about launching Elevate Jr. in our Early Childhood areas. Today I wanted to fill you in on how we are currently using Elevate Jr. and how we transitioned to it from a traditional Sunday School classroom format. [...]
[...] introduced the change we’ve made to Elevate Jr. earlier this week, and yesterday I talked about how we are using Elevate [...]
[...] just now finding this post, please don’t think I’m being negative. We have recently added Elevate Jr. to our Early Childhood way of teaching, and I’ve detailed earlier how we are using it, as well as what I love about the changes. [...]