Tag Archive - video

I Love Puppets, Really… I Do.

July 1, 2009 in Ministry with 8 Comments

puppetface

So this weekend I met one of our new staff pastors at the church.  I was introduced very nicely, but at the end it was added, “He’s kind of a different Children’s Pastor.  He doesn’t like puppets!”

I know this post will probably be misinterpreted by many,  but I’m going to answer for the blogging world why I don’t use puppets in our children’s ministry.  Let me preface it by saying that I grew up watching the Gospel Bill Show, and even went to Mexico for 2 weeks as a teenager with the specific responsibility of doing puppet shows.  I know how to work a puppet with best of them, and can easily manipulate the two-sticks as arms manuever on any sized puppet.  My thoughts don’t come from ignorance, but from experience.

I’ve made jokes that I don’t like puppets because I’m uncomfortable sticking my hand up it’s butt, or because I could never trust someone with blue skin; but the reality is that I think puppets are really great.  In fact, when used correctly and professionally they’re a great way to get a child’s attention.  I think of them like real-life living cartoons; and they can no doubt grab the attention of a little one.

However, there is another side of puppet ministry that many seem to ignore.  Most church puppet shows really, really, really stink.  There I said it.  They just stink.  Many think that if you give a few teenagers the puppet chest, and a puppet skit cassette tape that the world will be a better place.  Wake up people.  There is a saying in Kids’ Ministry that if 5th grade boys don’t like it, then nobody will like it.  Do you see many 5th grade boys begging for an appearance of Sid, the Blue faced teenage puppet and his sister Sally the blond pony-tailed know it all puppet?

So what’s replaced the puppets in my areas of ministry responsibility?

Video.  Video is cheaper, easier, and it’s fairly easy to reach excellence in a very short period of time.  With DVD ripping tools, and plethora of video editing tools; I can now quickly make videos segments that are far more effective than puppets (in their stinky state.)  In fact, I’ve found teenagers much more willing to run my light board and cue up video segments, than to operate puppets.  And by doing video, I don’t have to train a dozen people how to learn a skill that they will never use outside of my Children’s Ministry.  I know that hurts doesn’t it?  Puppet ministry isn’t real useful outside of jobs at Chucky Cheese’s or daycare.

However, before you paint me as a puppet-hater you need to know that many of the video’s I make for our kid areas have puppets in them.  Very well done, professional puppets.  Get that?  No teenagers and puppet mouths talking to the ceiling.   No Friday Night puppet skit practice to prepare for.  No combing of yarn hair to make sure the Devil Puppet has straight black hair, and it’s not too fuzzy.  Leave the puppet’s to the professionals.  Use their skills when you need them.

I love puppets. Seriously, I do.

So are you still using puppets with your Elementary-age kids?  Have you moved away from them?  Are you a puppet-lover, and everything you’ve just read made you mad?  Do share!

What I Like About Elevate Jr.

June 17, 2009 in Ministry with 1 Comment

thumbs_up I’ve introduced the change we’ve made to Elevate Jr. earlier this week, and yesterday I talked about how we are using Elevate Jr.

Today let’s tackle What I like about Elevate Jr.:

  • 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?

How I Use Elevate Jr.

June 16, 2009 in Ministry with 0 Comments

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.

  • 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?

Friends

June 12, 2009 in Links with 1 Comment

“A true friend is someone who thinks that you are a good egg even though he knows that you are slightly cracked”

Bernard Meltzer

Now somehow I’ve got to convice some friends of mine to sing this along with me somewhere.  Come on, you know you want to…

The Cliff Family All Day Project

May 23, 2009 in Personal with 1 Comment

This Friday I repeated part of a trend I started last Friday with the Car Drive video.  This week it was a special all-day project.  Me and the kids took pictures about every 5 minutes all day long.  There were some obvious gaps, where episodes of Spongebob Squarepants (yes, I’m that parent) and yard work got in the way.  May 22nd was a full day for the Cliff family.   From eating a grumpy breakfast, to taking Raider to the Dog groomer, to making a quick library run, to filling up the water bottles, to a special pre-Kindergarten Dr. visit (with shots and all!), then a reward for being such a good shot taker at McDonalds (Dylan is such a rockstar!), and back to the house, then yard work, then visiting Ryan as his special end-of-the-year school activity day, then back to the house, then picking up Ryan from school, then playing some Wii, eating dinner, and then cleaning the house for the parents-only date night (which included sushi and after dinner iced latte’s), and then back to make sure the kids were in bed!

Whew…

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