{"id":440178,"date":"2023-12-12T13:36:27","date_gmt":"2023-12-12T18:36:27","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/growcurriculum.org\/go?p=440178"},"modified":"2025-06-05T16:48:10","modified_gmt":"2025-06-05T20:48:10","slug":"3-year-teaching-strategy-for-childrens-ministry","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/growcurriculum.org\/go\/3-year-teaching-strategy-for-childrens-ministry\/","title":{"rendered":"A 3-Year Teaching Strategy for Children’s Ministry from Grow Curriculum"},"content":{"rendered":"

It’s so important to have a strategy for what you’ll teach kids. Without a strategy, we run the risk of missing important ideas, teaching only the topics that interest us most, and ultimately failing to give our kids a full and holistic view of God. Our goal should be to help kids grow spiritually by teaching and discussing Scripture in developmentally appropriate ways. So how do we do that? It comes down to what we teach every week, every month, and every year. <\/strong>And for kids, we also have to talk about how to teach them the whole Bible on a repeatable rhythm and sequence.<\/strong><\/p>\n

That’s a lot to figure out, and a lot of strategy to envision! But don’t worry \u2014 we’re going to share how we’ve structured all of this in Grow Kids Curriculum<\/a>. But don’t worry if you’ve never used <\/strong>Grow Kids<\/strong><\/a> in your ministry before. You can still steal our strategy!<\/strong> Take the ideas you find helpful, ignore the parts that don’t quite fit your context, and combine them with the unique language, vision, and strategy of your church.<\/p>\n

Now, let’s talk about our teaching strategy! We’ll start with the big picture and then get more specific as we go.<\/p>\n

HOW TO TEACH KIDS THE WHOLE BIBLE IN 3 YEARS<\/em><\/strong><\/h3>\n

When planning your teaching strategy, the most important thing you\u2019ll need to do is to establish your scope and sequence <\/strong>\u2014 a fancy term for what you\u2019ll teach (the scope) and when you\u2019ll teach it (the sequence).<\/p>\n

There are a lot of ways to structure your scope and sequence for teaching kids the Bible. Some people like to base their scope and sequence for kids on key topics, character traits, or moral lessons. But we think it’s important to give kids a solid biblical foundation by making the most important stories in the Bible the foundation of our scope and sequence.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Since preschoolers and elementary-aged kids are more likely to remember stories about God rather than abstract principles or ideas about God, it\u2019s so important to structure your scope and sequence for kids around biblical stories. <\/strong><\/p>\n

In short, we suggest teaching through the entire Bible, mostly<\/em> chronologically, <\/strong>with an equal balance between the Old Testament and New Testament. We say “mostly” because if you actually taught the Bible chronologically from start to finish, it would take a long <\/em>time to get to Jesus, and he’s the most important part of the whole thing! You’d also end up with some weird timing around big holidays. No one wants to teach about Job at Christmastime or Abraham on Easter week, right?<\/p>\n

To build this kind of scope and sequence, we came up with a list of all the major events in the Bible, in chronological order. The trick here was to try to create equally-sized buckets, <\/strong>each of which could contain about the same number of Bible stories kids need to hear. While there are lots of ways to do this, here’s what we came up with. It’s what the scope and sequence for Grow Kids Curriculum<\/a> is based on! In three years, we’ll cover …<\/p>\n