Whether for your own children or for teaching a Sunday School or Scripture class, sometimes you might need to write your own lessons. Stephanie Carmichael provides some basic tips.

Teaching the deep truths of Scripture to young minds is at once a privilege and an awesome responsibility. So preparing lessons needs to be done with great care and thought. Here are some key steps to bear in mind:

Pray
As with all teaching ministry, we must pray for our ability to understand and teach the Scriptures effectively, and pray for the obedient and faithful response of the hearers.

Know your audience
As much as possible, get to know the children you are trying to teach. What age are they? What stage of development are they at? What will they be able to understand? What teaching methods do they respond well to? What is their cultural background or family situation? What is their current level of biblical understanding?

The more variety in the children you are trying to teach, the more work you will need to do to ensure you communicate effectively with each individual.

Decide what you are going to teach
Make sure the passage or concept you are trying to teach is capable of being simplified and taught in a way that is approp-riate to the children’s stage of development. For example, parables are (by definition) abstract concepts which most young children will not be able to ‘interpret’ and infer a meaning.
As a general rule, children do not remember things that they don’t really understand. So, by and large, teaching them parts of the Bible in the hope that they might come to understand it later in life is an unsatisfactory approach.

Understand the passage or idea well enough to simplify and explain it
It may seem strange, but to simplify and explain a passage to young children – without distorting the message – you will need to have a very thorough understanding of it yourself – perhaps even better than if you are teaching the same passage or concept to adults. Remember, keeping things simple does not mean keeping them superficial!

Work out what the passage is saying, determine the main message you want to com-municate, and work out how you are going to simplify or explain difficult words or ideas. As adults, it is very easy to overestimate the life experience (what is a ‘shepherd’?) and vocabulary (what do you mean by ‘sin’, ‘love’, ‘Christian’, ‘faith’?) of young children.

Apply the passage to your own life – how are you going to respond to this part of God’s Word? How will you reinforce your teaching by your life and example?
Then think carefully about how you will apply the passage to the children’s lives. What meaningful applications will there be to a [five] year old? In their realm of life, what can they do to respond obediently and faithfully? How will you communicate this challenge to them?

Work out how you are going to communicate the message
We don’t have space in this article to discuss all the different ways of conveying a message. But if you are preparing a series of lessons, remember that variety is very important for young children, as are visual and auditory cues, and fun activities that reinforce the message.

Many people also make the mistake of putting lots of preparation into a visual aid or what they are going to do, but failing to give sufficient time to exactly what they are going to say (especially the crucial elements of introducing and concluding a lesson), and how they are going to check whether the children have understood what has been taught (eg: what review questions will they ask them?).

Stephanie Carmichael is a member of Christ Church, St Ives, and is the author of a number of children’s ministry resources. For more information see her 1999 book Their God is so BIG (available from Matthias Media) or visit the website www.teachinglittleones.com.