I believe that there is no such thing as a perfect curriculum. Just as there is no perfect person, church, or children’s pastor. I do not expect these things to be changed, but I am simply trying to share the things that have been limiting about our Elevate Jr. transition.
The take home portions are very, very, very weak. We spent a great amount of time looking into First Look, by the Rethink Group; and when you compare Elevate Jr. with First Look only taking into account the take home ingredients it isn’t even close. Overall, this is the biggest weakness with Elevate Jr..
There needs to be more ORANGE elements with the curriculum to provoke spiritual conversations at home. I would love to see take-home DVD’s, refrigerator magnets outlining the 8 week series (this is a First Look thing), take-home songs, and a more beefed up family devotional.
I also wish Elevate Jr. had a more assessable website for families to interact with the current series from home.
The music portions are weak. The songs are very professionally arranged, and the audio is fine; I just think there are plenty of current songs that kids hear on radio stations and with their parents that would be a better fit.
On that note, I would love to send families home with music from the series so they could play it in the car and around the house. I think music is quite possibly the best take home product for kids to continue spiritual conversations at home.
Maybe this is the case with future series on Elevate Jr., but I wish the activity portions were more age specific. We are using Elevate Jr. with our 3 year old children through Kindergarten, and it would be nice if there were a few 3 year specific activities. I know that Elevate does this with the Elementary versions, so I’m keeping my fingers crossed.
This has been the most uncomfortable post I’ve done in months. I really hate to point out the negative things, but felt that it was important to state what wasn’t working. Overall, we are all very happy with the change and I’m looking forward to what this change mean for our church and families. I’ve already had testimonials from parents about the excitement their kids are showing about attending church, and from parents that are impressed that their little ones can retell the lesson so well.
If you haven’t already please take the time to look over my previous posts about Elevate, and if you are using Elevate or Elevate Jr. please joing the conversation. We need your voice!
It’s consistent. It has long been a challenge to maintain a consistent level of teaching across all classrooms. I needed something that would guarantee me that children were all going home with a biblical truth that was consistently taught to each child in each classroom. I cannot overstate this enough, seriously.
It has forced our classrooms into a schedule. I’ll be the first to admit that it has been a major weakness of our Early Childhood departments that we have not had a consistent schedule. Some teachers were spending 45 minutes on crafts, while others were skipping it all together. Elevate Jr. has been awesome at making it easy to walk down the 3 year old hallway, and realistically know what should be happening in each classroom. It is going to hold our teachers much more accountable to doing what needs to be done and not getting bogged down in one area or another.
No More Snack Time! There just isn’t time for it anymore, because Elevate Jr. has made our classrooms more deliberate about every minute of the classroom experience. Elevate Jr. has allowed us to abandon the expensive, lunch-ruining snack tradition that exists in so many different Early Childhood areas. This change alone has scared away a few leaders. I’ve learned that snack time was being used as a crutch for poor planning…and that is an entire separate conversation.
The video portions are very well done. I cannot state this more clearly to my Children’s Pastor friends: NOT all video materials are created equal. Elevate Jr. is very well done. The colors are vivid and sharp, the set designs are wonderfully created, the actors are lively and captivating to the kids, and the DVD itself is super easy to use.
It’s not a video-only curriculum. While the video elements are key to teaching the lesson each week, it is not the sole presentation of the biblical elements. My group leaders still have to prepare, lead, and become engaging storytellers. This is a fact that I’ve had to demonstrate this to my existing leaders, so that they will not be misguided in their belief that we are asking our televisions to teach our kids on Sunday Mornings.
It gives leaders the opportunity to put more time into building relationships with the kids. Elevate Jr. is great at taking the main teaching burden off my teachers (although it is still there in a smaller form), and instead puts the emphasis on what happens during classroom activity, main point activity and other elements that include teacher-child interaction.
If you use Elevate Jr., what am I missing? Anything that you love about it that I forgot?
We tested it out during our Saturday Night services for 8 weeks. It was a great success, and we learned a lot about what we needed to do to make it work on our much busier Sunday Mornings.
My Early Childhood Coordinator and I held special training meetings on the four Wednesday nights leading up to our Sunday Morning launch. At these meetings we provided dinner, and did the first lesson of Spy Chase Jr. for the leaders. Yes, we treated them like they were the children.
These meetings were key, because they helped creat buy-in from some very important people and it helped move out some that needed to be moved out. Know what I mean?
During the training we were clear with our leaders that we are only married to our spouses; we’re not married to one particular way of using this curriculum, and we’re open and willing to tweak how we use Elevate Jr. I think this helped ease people’s minds about doing something new.
We are using Spy Chase Jr. to launch with. I believe it is the first of the Elevate Jr. series’ that was created.
We are using the Large Group Format, with the entire video portion of the curriculum being shown at the same time. We are not however using it as a true large group. We are gathering the age groups that were previously split into one area for the video.
For example, the 3 year old children check-in to their separate rooms based on their last names; then move to one room to gather for the large group video, then dismiss back to their separate rooms for the classroom activities. The same is done with the 4’s together, and the 5 & 6’s together.
We print the large group manual for each classroom leader at our print shop, taking out the activities we will NOT do that week. In other words, we only give the teachers what they will need. This is a big difference from giving leaders a teacher’s manual, and telling them to not use certain elements of that same teacher’s manual. Why create needless confusion?
We have asked the stronger of the two age group leaders to lead the video time with the kids. For the most part, we haven’t had a problem with this and we hope to allow both group leaders to eventually split the video teaching time.
Am I leaving anything out? What would you like to know before I get to the postivies and negatives later this week?
Posted by Jonathan Cliff | Posted in Ministry | Posted on 06-15-2009
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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!
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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!
Posted by Jonathan Cliff | Posted in Ministry | Posted on 12-17-2007
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Today I responded to some questions about what we do in our children’s areas at the church. Thought I would post them for the record. (And because it took me 10 minutes to do it.)
Small Groups * How much ‘text’ do you give volunteers? Using Elevate curriculum, I usually select 1, maybe 2 activities and distribute the appropriate scripts, discussion questions, and/or activities * How different is your Preschool small group material from your Elementary small group material? Right now it’s in a transition, which is to say that the Preschool area is more traditional in teaching nature. No Preschool ‘Small Groups.’ * What is the MAIN THING you are focusing on for your ’small group time?’ Relationship building and applications for the kids to make use of what was learned in the large group teaching. * How long is your ’small group time?’ 10-20 minutes * What new ideas, formats or processes have you tried & been successful? We have moved all prayer time, offering, and some special music into the small group areas. * What works for you? Still figuring that out. Small groups have allowed us to improve the the safety and security aspects of our ministry; eliminating the ‘get lost’ factor we find in large groups.
Large Group * Do you use video? How much? Again, we use the Elevate curriculum. But we do the live performances with the video that runs in the background. Some series have been much better than others. * Do your kids enjoy video? When it’s not the ‘Main Thing’; they really get into it. * How long is your ‘production’ time? 25-30 minutes * Do you use volunteers on stage? YES! * Do you teach the Bible Story on stage? How? I rotate with some trained volunteers, using the Elevate ‘Performance’ videos that back up the teaching on the screen. It’s really a cool way to teach. (Not all Elevate series work this way, though.) * Do you have fun Large Group games you do on stage? What are some examples? We do games at times, but they tend to take up to much time, and don’t get everyone involved. We usually reserve game times for small groups.
Teaching Tricks * Do you do a new Memory Verse each week or every ‘X’ number of weeks? New verse every week. * Do you use a ‘Main Point’ or ‘Key Phrase’ each week to help the kids see a ‘main idea?’ New Main point and Key point every week, however they are all related for 8 weeks of teaching. * Do you use motions with your kids to help them remember Main Points & Memory Verses? Always motions with at least one of them each week. * Are their other teaching tricks you might have tried that help the lesson stick? Anything that brings all the lights down, except those lights on the stage with the teacher. Anything with sound effects keeps the volume down in my audience; and of course the bigger and messier the stage the more memorable it will be. My big challenge is keeping it fresh every week, and not letting it bog down into the same formula every week. * Do you use ‘Parent Letters’ that go home with the kids? Are they successful? I like them, but the work involved isn’t worth the reward. Parents simply didn’t miss them when I stopped doing it.
Please forgive my grammar and spelling errors. Thank You!
