Rotation Sunday School

• The kids gain a very thorough understanding of each bible story.
• It tells the stories in a wide array of mediums to accommodate a wide variety of learning styles.
• The teachers only have to commit for 5 weeks.
• The teachers only have to prepare one lesson.
• The teachers are provided with lots of materials, ideas, and instructions with which to work.
• We have had husband/wife teaching teams and mother/daughter teaching teams that have really enjoyed a new way of working together.
• The kids have made creative art projects which have beautified the church building rather than piling up on your kitchen counters.
• Even the adults involved learn something new in every story.
• It's fun! The kids are excited and bringing their friends, and always can't wait to find out which room they will be in this Sunday.

For the past seven years, a growing number of churches across our denomination have been experimenting with a new way of doing Sunday School called The Workshop Rotation Model. You haven't heard about it because there isn't any need to sell curriculum for it.

"We weren't trying to invent a new model, we were just trying to solve our problems," said Melissa Hansche, D.C.E. at the Presbyterian Church of Barrington, one of the churches in the Chicago Presbytery where the model got its start.

What problems is she talking about? Bored kids and teachers, declining attendance and Bible literacy, drab classrooms, expensive curriculum, poor teacher preparation, teacher recruitment trouble, (your problem here).

It is one of the worst kept secrets in the Church, that and a spreading belief that traditional Sunday School has outlived its usefulness, if it ever worked at all. (Memo to Research Services: Where are all those kids we had in our Sunday Schools back in the so-called "good old days" of the 50's and 60's? They're at home reading the Sunday paper or out on the soccer fields.) "Like a lot of other churches in our Presbytery, we knew we had to do something and soon." said Hansche. "And we knew that one more "new and improved" curriculum wasn't the answer either. Been there, done that."

Here's the Workshop Rotation Model in a nutshell: Teach major Bible stories and concepts through kid-friendly multimedia workshops: an Art workshop, Drama, Music, Games, A-V, Puppets, Storytelling, Computers, and any other educational media you can get your hands on. Teach the same Bible story in all of the workshops for four or five weeks rotating the kids to a different workshop each week. And here comes the extremely teacher friendly part: Have the same teacher in each workshop for all five weeks teaching the same lesson week after week to the different classes coming in. The results, says Linda Beckham, D.C.E. at Tampa's Palma Ceia Church are astounding. "The kids love it, the teachers love it, and we can't ever imagine going back to the old way."