How to teach a Bible lesson effectively: Bring your lesson to life.

 

How to teach a Bible lesson effectively: Effective teaching strategies.

When teaching a lesson a teacher aims to instill, and promote positive change in a child’s life. A bible lesson, is not a preaching, a bible lesson is not at all a lecture but rather, an experience and, how do your learners experience what you are teaching if you do not bring the experience to the classroom, throughout the lesson?

At times we blame our learners thinking they are the problem, “They just will not lisssssen.” “Oooh I’ve tried everything they just aren’t interested.” Hahaha I’ve had my fair share, still do now and again I get it, it can be frustrating. “If at first you do not succeed, try, try, and try again.”

When telling our lessons it is important that our lessons are appealing to all or each of the learning types in the classroom (we will discuss learning types in one of the blogs soon).

You know how chefs’ say, we eat with our eyes first before, we eat with our mouths? I think it is the same with our lessons; our lessons need to be balanced for all our learning types, and for the particular age group, all the more when you have a variety of ages in one class.

For the next few weeks we are to break down this blueprint or strategy; this week we are focusing on bringing the lesson to life.

·      Your blueprint or strategy:

a.   Bring your lesson to life:

b.   Simplify your lesson:

c.   Application story:

d.   Use your props:

 

 

a.   Bring the lesson to life:

When telling your lesson as stated in the previous blog, it is important to forget you are a grown up with this one. The secret key with this one is to use the IMAGINATION, e.g. if you get to a point where you are expressing what certain characters in the bible said, you change your voice to fit or express that of the characters.

If you can, do dress up like the characters, and if you can, have your learners’ dress up as well. If you can, decorate the classroom according to the theme of the lesson.

In this way, you are opening up a world they have never seen or imagined, at the same both you and your learners are having fun, and learning.

You’ve killed enough birds with one stone there, and everyone is happy. Learning should not always be serious and strenuous.

I remember working with a particular congregation I had worked with for well over a year. I had a variety of age groups in my class, and we had your unconventional class, class was under a tree.

Working with a big class where you have a mixture of age groups can be challenging especially, if you have a 2 year old who thinks everything about Sunday school is boooooring, and “big church with mom and dad is cool.” This was a vocal 2 year old, I tried by all means to keep him interested but, nothing worked.

Until one day, we had been learning about The Garden of Eden; I wrote a script down of the garden of Eden and I had the kids act the scene in the Garden of Eden out, the cute vocal 2 year old boy played God (I stood next to him to, whisper everything he had to say into his ear) and I kept him steady on a sort of high plain where he could watch down on Adam, Even, and the Serpent.

I choose obviously Adam, Eve, and the Serpent and handed scripts to each child accordingly. The rest were to watch. Conveniently our class was under a tree, I had an apple tied to a branch in the tree.

My learners’ acted out the scene of “The Fall” in the Garden of Eden, man did my learners enjoy, watching them enjoy made me enjoy all the more. I remember how my grumpy 2 year old enjoyed playing God and how annoyed he was by end of Sunday school that morning. Long story short, he made sure he never missed Sunday school, and I heard that evening, he was on the dining table telling his family about what he learnt at Sunday school that morning.

There is nothing I enjoy like, bringing the lesson to life; I am the kind of teacher who falls to the floor if the character in the lesson fell to the floor. Our learners need to fully experience the lesson; our approach must be at their level. We can’t have learners or those we teach, think the bible is a sad boring book when it is not, we can’t have our learners think, what a sad and boring lesson that was.