We have found within the last several months that many churches have decided to use the Kids 4 Truth materials for Sunday school, junior church, or a combination of the two. Why is this an appealing time for some? Here are just a few reasons:

1. Using the program through Sunday school and Junior Church gives a more focused and longer period of time to implement all of the curriculum and components.
2. Some churches have a weekday club already in place that they would like to keep, but they see the importance of teaching their children essential doctrines.
3. Some churches are not at a point that they can start a weekday club, but would like to revamp what they are using for Sunday school in order to really ground their boys and girls in essential, Christian truth. 

Are you interested in trying out Kids 4 Truth on Sunday? What does that look like for your church? The following are a few starter ideas, but please share your thoughts if you are already using K4T in this format.

1. Use the Sunday school hour for a more in depth teaching time. Make sure to incorporate a few songs that tie into the lesson, some object lessons, and illustrations (all of these can be found on this site under the Downloads tab).
2. Use the junior church hour for focused small group time and awards. (These first two time scenarios can easily be swapped, as well, if you find that you have several children who only come to junior church and not to Sunday school.)
3. If you are in a church that does not have the space or workers to split up the ages very much, you can have a more focused "small" group time to go through book questions and the memory work as an entire group. It will take twice the energy level and interactivity to make sure that all of the ages are with you and excited about learning. Make sure to use plenty of different interactive teach techniques in order to teach the Memorize It! sections, and also use your older children to be your special helpers in aiding in the learning process for the younger ones.
   
4. If you do have the chance to break up your group into a couple of smaller groups, some of the kids can be working on a craft that pertains to the lesson, doing a choir time, or having their own small group while the others are working on their memory work. 
   
5. Wall charts are great, eye-catching reminders of progress that the kids are making on their memory work. If you don't want to use patches and the awards for a Sunday school time, you can come up with some other creative rewards for the kids by using the awards charts to mark off certain goals that you would like them to reach. Reward their effort by throwing an ice cream party or having a popsicle day during Junior Church.

So what are some ideas that you have seen work in your church? What are some things that you have found don't work in the Sunday School or Junior Church set up? Do you have any questions on how this might be incorporated into your church setting? 

 

We are getting ready to implement Kids 4 Truth into our "Sunday School" time in September. We were actually referred to this curriculum from a sister church in southern Iowa and it took me about an hour to come to the conclusion that this is what we needed. Last September our church discontinued AWANA for many reasons but primarily because it was creating the wrong end goal for our kids. It dealt primarily with quantity and application was sacrificed to get the awards. So we stripped everything away and created a program, Shine, that took the best of Sunday School (teaching; doctrine), VBS (evangelism; worship), AWANA (verse memorization; evangelism). We switched curriculum's and are using Generations of Grace because of the unified teaching of the redemptive history of the Bible. We added a worship time that the kids love. But we have struggled with having a verse memorization system that challenges our kids the way AWANA attempted. So 2 months ago we were ready to write our own verse memorization program that offered age specific memorizing, had application questions that accompanied the verses, and was bound in an attractive booklet. Then came Kids 4 Truth and it was exactly what we were looking for! So here is how we are going to implement it into Shine. Our program runs for 70 minutes on Sunday Evenings, coinciding with our Adult classes. Kids 4 Truth will be a 20-30 minute time dedicated to classroom discussion about our Kids 4 Truth topic and incorporating small group to work on verse memorization and further discussion. Now this is where my questions come. What is the best way to maximize the productivity of this small amount of time? How are other churches using this small group time? Any help would be awesome!

A couple of quick questions to make sure that I'm understanding you right. Are you actually teaching the Kids 4 Truth lesson followed by a short small group time where the kids will recite their K4T memory work followed by a seperate teaching time using the Generations of Grace? Or, are you basically only doing a small group time using the K4T memory work and then working through Generations of Grace materials? This will definitley make a difference in how you run your evening. 

If you are doing the latter, I would only causion you to make sure to tie both the K4T work and the Generations of Grace lessons together. It shouldn't be too difficult to do, since God's Word is all about God demonstrating both His character and works. You will know what works best in your situation, but here is a scenario that may work, or that may have elements that work in your setting. 

• Opener: You might want to begin with the short opener that introduces both key focuses for the evening (the theme that they are doing their memory work from as well as the theme of the teaching lesson of Generations of Grace in a creative way). Using the lesson plans from online would be a big help here as they contain openers and illustrations. This will really help tie the truths that the kids are learning in both their memory work and from the lesson together, and make sure that they are understanding what they are memorizing. It will also help them to see how that doctrine about God is revealed practically through His Word in your other lesson.
  
• Small Group Time: After that (maybe 10 minute) opener, I would break up into small group time (your 20-30 minute time slot). Preferablly split up boys and girls and by grade if you have the room and workers. the more workers per kiddos the better, so that you are really able to guage what the kids are learning. This time should be basically limitted to recitation of the memory work (which the kids have hopefully worked on at home). The small group leaders should be encouraged to ask the kids questions about the verses to guage their understanding and how they might be applying these verses in their own lives personally. Basically the leaders will listen to kids one by one who are ready to quote while the others sit quietly to work on their memory work. If you have bus children who get no help whatsoever at home, you may want to have the leader work on verses all together as a group. Explain the question, answer, and verse briefly; then use the time to work on memorizing the verse in a few creative ways.
  
• Worship Time: I'm not sure what you are currently doing in your worship time, but I would definitely recommend using songs that tie into the lesson and doctrine again that you are teaching. You could really use it as a great time to exalt God for His awesome attributes and works you are studying about. 
• Lesson Time: The only thing I would say about this is to make sure to tie in the doctrine they are working on in their memory work to the lesson you are teaching that evening.
• Award Time: I'm not sure if you are doing the awards for their memory work, but if so, it would be great to finish off the evening with this time to recognize the hard work the kids are doing. You can use the bonus patches or your own seperate awards for other other elements of the program or service acts as well.   

Hopefully this helps, and I pray that the Lord will richly bless your ministry! 

We would be doing the latter. Man, I'm not crazy to fit all that into 70 minutes! :) Thanks so much for you input. That answers another question that I have, kind of. By what you said (and I probably need to do some more digging into the info, we just decided to go with this 3 weeks and I am still learning), the kids work ahead. Meaning they come prepared, not introduce and then recited the next week? Or is that what you are meaning? As far as how the program time is broken up, we are actually running two groups (preschool, elementary/juniors). Which means separate worship times which makes the intro part hard to do but not out of the question. Plus our 3 year old class is about the size of most of our older classes. We have become a baby producing machine in the last 5 years. So we have split ages. Any ideas? Lesson Time: That is a great idea. I mean I was planning on it but that helped me think through how we are going to bring the two together. That has been a question that the teachers have been asking about. Award time is something that I am still thinking through. I am thinking of doing classroom awards but then having quarterly times where we get the kids in front of the church and give special awards. This would be a huge thing for them as we are a church of 700 and most are there in the evenings when we are running the program. As you can see we have alot of work to do before a Sept. 7 launch. Thanks so much for the ideas.

It will definitely take a lot of thinking through, and I'm sure you'll also find things that don't work or do work as you go along your first year with this change. The kids coming prepared will be a huge step in the right direction in getting through everything you want to. That's more what I was referring to of having the small group time be strictly a recitation and reinforcement time. That's why I suggested the opener as a time to tie it together. However, you could tie it together in the lesson time alone and make that work.

As far as splitting up groups, it usually works best to have the younger kids seperate the entire time. We recommend having a 3-4 year old's class and a K-5 class if that's feasable. Their understanding level is worlds apart from the older kids. I will admit that it might be pretty tricky to incorperate both curriculum plans into the younger levels. That is a lot of different information for their little minds to process. In a typical Kids 4 Truth club that only uses the K4T curriculum, most churches will incorperate the K4T lesson, memory work, review, songs, craft all around the key truth that they are working on and break those up into little 5-10 minute chunks of time. Most will work on learning and reciting all together as a group.