Lesson writing tips.
I haven’t written too many Sunday School lessons, but since my undergraduate degree is in creative writing and publication, I thought this might be an area I could look into.
I’ve written just a handful of lessons, but there were definitely a few things I would suggest anyone keep in mind as they write lessons.
1. Write for two characters. If you have enough people, it would be a good idea to write your lesson with a second character. I almost always have two people in the lesson. One person is written as the adult who is communicating the Bible story, and the other is written through the eyes of a child around the median age of the children who will be in the audience.
Some of the benefits to this: while in many scenarios it would be encouraged to allow children the opportunity to interact with the teacher/storyteller, there are times during the lesson when the children should be quiet. The interaction between the storyteller and his/her assistant creates that sense of interaction throughout the story time without allowing the kids to interrupt or spend the rest of the time talking about how their pet iguana broke out of its aquarium and made its way over to the neighbor’s house (true story).
I intentionally write the assistant character to react to the storyteller as an eight-year-old child would. This gives me the opportunity to preempt any questions that might come from the audience. It also gives the children a voice throughout the lesson. The assistant can ask the questions that burning in the kids’ minds, but it gives the storyteller a well-thought-through, scripted answer and doesn’t break the flow of the lesson.
It’s also important to write some interaction because it can help make the story easier to memorize. I’m a big proponent of memorizing lessons. Not all my teachers do it, but the ones who do are the ones who are the most effective at communicating with the kids. I won’t go into why I think memorization is important, but if you’re curious, I highly recommend this book by Aaron Reynolds.
2. Keep it short. Your lesson shouldn’t go beyond 15-20 minutes. The bulk of our service time is spent in small group activities, and that’s where children can learn how to process and, in some cases, apply the lesson that they just heard. Additionally, children’s attention spans aren’t that great, so your whole story-time (songs included) shouldn’t go much longer than 30 minutes. Any longer and you risk losing the kids’ attention and their ability to learn.
3. Make it as interactive as possible. Kids love to interact with the lesson. Instead of telling the kids that something happened in the Bible, why not give them the opportunity to act it out? They also like to see their peers and/or people they’re close to get involved in the lesson.
Here are a couple examples from our Palm Sunday lesson. Before the kids got to large group, we had all the small groups make palm branches from construction paper and tongue depressors. During large group, toward the end of the story, when Jesus rode to Jerusalem on the donkey, all the children waved their palm branches and shouted “Hosanna! Blessed is the King!”
Early in the story, we talked about how Jesus healed a man who was born blind. So we got one of their small group leaders to play the part of the blind man. All he had to do was crawl around and yell, “I’m blind!” And then the storyteller (narrating and re-creating Jesus’ actions) took brownie mix made to look like mud and smeared it on the small group leader’s face.
These are just a few ideas that came to mind as I wrote those lessons. Do you have any ideas? I’d love to find out about some of them! Leave a comment below and share your thoughts!
