Keeping your community safe has taken on new meaning in the current climate. Coronavirus restrictions are keeping us at home and at a distance from the faith-based institutions that keep us grounded and performing at our best in all aspects of life. Faith is a powerful and important component of many of our lives, and the reduction in contact with our communities has certainly taken its toll.
Sunday school is a particularly important part of this weekly ritual of faith. It’s where we send our children to learn the stories of the Bible and form the same moral foundations that still guide our lives as adults. Sunday school curriculum is incredibly important to the development of well-rounded individuals capable of taking on the challenges of a confusing world. Fortunately, delivering Sunday school instruction can be done outside the classroom, just like any other schooling.
Delivering the content.
Scripture is an important backbone of any Sunday school lesson. God’s word drives the Sunday school curriculum and informs the learning process. It’s the thing that our parables, examples, and direct learning experiences are drawn from because these are stories of the acts Jesus engaged in while here on Earth. These examples of the moral path form the basis of our discussions and learning outcomes that would normally be a central component in Sunday school lessons.
There are really two main ways to deliver these essential readings from a distance. You can order bulk USB drives in order to hand-deliver the reading material to your students, or you can put the content online. The approach is wholly dependent on what your community will digest better. With online content, you run the risk of students simply not logging in to see the updates. Alternatively, with the bulk USB drive delivery, you can control the environment, in a way, by creating tailored PDFs for your students. Reading from your formatted documents, students may be less inclined to drift off and Google something else while on the internet.
You can format the content in any way you like, whether it’s scanning pages from a textbook you already use in your weekly lessons or rewriting the content for smaller component pieces that you aim to teach over an extended period with shorter lessons. Thumb drives come in a variety of storage options — 4GB, 8GB, and 16GB, to name a few — so you can find the best option for you and order custom flash drives that serve your needs. In this way, flash drives can offer a great content delivery solution and are small enough to mail or hand-deliver to your students, whichever makes the most sense for your community.
Virtual meetings for engaging discussions.
Organizing virtual meetings every week is the best option for keeping your congregation safe during this time of great uncertainty. Keeping your students at home is not ideal, but the chance of virus transmission drops to zero if you remain distanced from one another in this way.
Creating content for Zoom or Skype calls can be fun as well. Breaking concepts down into smaller pieces might be the perfect way to convey ideas of morality and other religious virtues to students who may be distracted by the background of their home environments. Having students read a pdf from their flash drive before the lesson and then honing in on one particular topic or concept can be a great way to engage them in meaningful discussion on an incredibly important key concept before sending them on their way to think about the lesson.
The main goal of Sunday school is to leave students contemplating the best path forward in their lives, so creating short, targeted content that focuses intensely on a core concept of Jesus Christ and the Apostles’ actions might be the perfect way to leave a lasting question mark in their minds as they depart your virtual classroom and venture into playtime or gear up for school on Monday morning.
Sunday school is a mindset builder, so focus on delivering the core ideas as thought-provokingly as possible, through the best possible medium that keeps our families safe, together.