Creative Bible Study is a useful website for you to know about. They have children’s lessons, pre-k lessons, object lessons, and many other Bible study/teaching tools.
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Archive for October, 2009
Upon reading Sam Luce’s blog today, I was made aware of a really cool effort at bringing families together for worship during the Christmas Season. You can read the blog post here. I have already signed my family up and we’ll be participating. This looks like a great resource to share with the families of your church! It is sponsored by Dayspring and is called the Happy Birthday Jesus Project.
Congratulations also to Derek Fielder who won the Alan Nelson KidLead book!
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I came across a site that is a little bit like Free CM Stuff. It’s called Cool Kids Ministries. Steve Harney has a few things on his site that you may find helpful. Of particular interest to me was the Lesson Plans and Magic Tricks. I also plan to build that Wind Tunnel for VBS next year!
You may also be interested in:
- Free Kid Leadership Book Offer
- Coldwater Cafe: CM Resources, Articles, and Provider Directory
- Free Curriculum-over a year’s worth
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Let me place a disclaimer on this post. I try to personally use everything that I post about, however, I came across this site and have to admit that I have not downloaded the software. I only know what the Kidzui site tells me. Nonetheless, this looks like a great tool for us to offer our parents. Just be sure to try it yourself before you offer it to them!
**Kind of cool that Todd McKeever at Take 2.0 blogged about this on the same day! We didn’t coordinate, I promise!
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I think Alan Nelson may be on to something and us Children’s Ministry leaders must listen! Alan was a pastor and leadership guru for many years and has recently discovered that developing children as leaders is really the best way to develop leaders. His organization, KidLead, is devoted to this cause and his principles are outlined in his book, KidLead: Growing Great Leaders.
I have begun reading the book that Alan kindly sent me and I really like where he is going so far. He has had recommendations of the book by the likes of Craig Jutila, John Kotter, and Les Parrot.
Alan is giving one of his books away to a lucky Free CM Stuff reader. Simply leave a comment in this post with your name (be sure to fill in the email part) and I will do a random drawing next Wednesday to determine the winner. Alan will send the winner a signed copy of his book. Good luck!
You may also be interested in:
- A book by my friend Jon Slone called Riggleberry Bloke.
- Connect with Kids–Research Based Newsletter
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Earlier in the year, I posted about Jot Form, a free “What you see is what you get (WYSIWYG) online survey generator. Another tool you may want to check out is Zoho Creator. Zoho is another WYSIWYG form/database creator, but I think that it has a little bit better interface for when you look at submitted data and the free version also includes a file uploader, which is a little easier to manage than Jotform.
You may use these for program evaluations, parent feedback, as volunteer recruitment tools, or to register participants in your ministries. They are both very good form generators. I actually prefer Jotform, I think it is easier to use overall, but wanted to make sure you knew about this one as well in case you liked the interface better.
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If you are not familiar with Skype, it is a free computer to computer/phone line calling software. Computer phone systems have not quite taken the country by storm, but at this point they do have some special abilities, and yes, for the sake of my site, Skype is free (for the basic features and computer to computer calling).
This Sunday, I will be calling a family from our church who is serving in East Asia during both children’s worship services. I’ll project their video call on the screen and the computer will emit sound through the sound system so that all the kids in the worship can take part. We will hear them share their heart for missions and using a web cam in the worship room, we will allow some children to ask the missionary children questions.
We have done this once before and it was a success. You do have to beware that the video and sound could be choppy and it may take a few tries when the other person is in a country with poor internet infrastructure. But overall, it’s a good way to expose kids to missions work.
I read two posts yesterday that I wanted to be sure to pass along to you.
1. Sam Luce–VBS Give Away. Sam is giving away some Go Fish VBS curriculum. Get your name in the hat, he’ll announce a winner on Friday.
2. Tony Kumner–Ministry To Children–Tony has a great page on his site called 68 Practical Benefits of Kids Ministry. These are some great lists to use in newsletters, budget meetings, or recruiting campaigns.
You may also be interested in:
1. “No Other Ministry” publication (a creative look at CM)
2. “What If” article to parents
How many of you evaluate your volunteers? If you do, great! If not, I’ve got a little tool you can use…as always…free of charge!
This coming Sunday, my Sunday School Coordinator (Amy you are the best!) and I are going to start doing 2 minute walk throughs in each classroom. The object is for us to pop into the room, get an idea of what is going on in the 4 areas of: Teacher, Kids, Content, and Environment, and provide a bit of feedback for the teachers.
At first, I thought evaluating teachers was going to be more difficult than wiping cheese doodle dust off of my 3 year old’s face, but I had a stunning idea. At a meeting to kick off the new school year, I decided to present the 4 key areas of evaluation and the 2 minute walk through concept to the teachers. They liked it, so I asked them to identify the individual points in each area they would like us to evaluate them on. 10 minutes later and I had a “teacher generated” evaluation tool! The burden was not on me, it was now on them because they came up with it!
The plan is to pop into each room about 6-7 times per year. I’ve told them to also use the form (which will be hanging on a clipboard by their lightswitch) as a self evaluation form or to have a friend come in, observe, and complete the evaluation for them. This is just a new and small step in generating greater excellence and accountability in the efforts of my volunteers.
You can download the document here on the Volunteer Training page. It’s a Word document that you can feel free to adjust. No copyrights on this one!
What about you? What do you do to evaluate your volunteers?
Muddy River Media is a nice little site for countdowns, looping effects, a few videos, and some sermon theme packages. It’s definitely not a gold mine, but the work they have done is quality and it is a well designed site. I hope that others will catch onto what they are doing and support Mark Fogarty’s work. Something like this has great potential in the market of highly priced media material.
