This blogsite serves as an archive of ideas for education and Sunday School activities. It is meant for communication and conversation among pastors, teachers, and parents who are using Sola Publishing educational products and other resources.
Monday, August 30, 2010
Feedback Page: Sunday Schoolhouse Series
Please use this page to provide feedback on Sola's Sunday Schoolhouse series — a simple reproducible Sunday School series that focuses on the teaching of Bible stories. You are welcome to provide encouragement, constructive criticism, recommendations, or suggestions.
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Thanks for offering feedback on the Sunday Schoolhouse series. When I receive notification of your comment, I can approve it for posting.
ReplyDeletePastor Steve King
Director, Sola Publishing
My congregation is using the new books this year. I like the memory booklet. I also like being able to photocopy the coloring pictures.
ReplyDeleteThis has been working out great for our new congregation. We have only a single class, with kids in kindergarten, second grade, and 4,5,6th. We do 45 minutes of Bible time, with some songs/music.
ReplyDeleteMarjorie K
This is the best Sunday School curriculum I've taught. The stories are told in words that are much more easily understood for chidren. The students will better recognize and remember these important stories from the bible as they grow because they have had fun learning them.
ReplyDeleteThank for doing such a complete curriculum. It's also easy to present to the children!
ReplyDeleteWe tried this as a new curriculum for our Sunday Schoolthis pastfall.This curriculum works wells for our younger class of three years olds through kindergarden. It was too easy for our older classes of second through six grades. All of the older children are honor roll students in school. They found it not challenging enough for them. They were used to looking up the Bible stories in the Bible and doing more complicated worksheets or word searches. Our previous material had more background for the teachers use.
ReplyDeleteThanks for your comment. You are correct in observing that the materials used "as is" tend to lean toward the younger grades. This is because the Sunday Schoolhouse series is written with a mixed-age audience in mind, which would include both readers and non-readers.
ReplyDeleteI have had several churches mention that they have had the older children look up stories in Scripture, and discuss some prepared questions — with more of a Bible study approach.
In this first year of development, the Sunday Schoolhouse materials have focused only on classroom story resources. Eventually, discussion questions, teacher's introductions, and the weekly activities we have posting here on the Sola "Table Talks" site will be incorporated into teachers' guides which will accompany each unit.
Sola Comments…
ReplyDeleteWe have a small group of children in our two classrooms with four to eight in each room. The following comments were gathered from the teachers after using Year A of Sola’s “Sunday Schoolhouse” curriculum and than finishing the summer classes with several previous Sola VBS curricula. Some of the strong points of the Sola curriculum are…all ages studying the same bible story works great, the theme word and definition gave a nice focus for the children, the coloring pictures were used each week, and the drama skits worked super for the All Age Opening. We used the drama to introduce each week’s lesson before the adults and children dispersed to their separate classrooms for greater learning.
Some points that we felt could be improved were…more background information for teacher preparation, more age appropriate activity sheets for various ages, a recommendation of a Children’s book that could be used as a preschool visual to support the bible story.
From the "David: Hero of God" curriculum, the teachers enjoy the extra activity sheets and added information about the story.
Thank you!
Thanks for the feedback. You make some good observations. In fact, as I mentioned in the post above yours, in the future we intend to add the features you suggest to the Sunday Schoolhouse program in the form of Teacher's Guides to go with each book.
ReplyDeleteIt has been very tempting for me to take on the task of plowing ahead with extra materials. However, with such limited time and so much for our small staff to do, I have come to the conclusion that we must focus on the basic books for the time being.
We will, however, continue to post additional "free stuff" (activities, ice breakers, etc.) on the Sola site as we go along.