Monday, November 10, 2014

Getting Stuck Sorting out a Story :: 5 of 31 Days of Blogging :: Stuck



Day 5 :: Stuck
 
A big part of being a BSF (Bible Study Fellowship) Children’s Leader is the preparation homework we are required to do.  It involves writing up the story we will tell, preparing questions to ask, selecting hymns, and developing introduction sentences that tie the hymns to the day’s lesson.  

I frequently get stuck writing the story.  Sometimes it is because there are so many things I want to include and I am not sure how to say them without making the story too long for a fourteen-month-old.  Other times, it is because the concepts are complex and we need to keep the vocabulary simple.  And sometimes it is because there really doesn’t seem to be much of a story.  

BSF really takes the children through the Bible in a way much deeper than what Sunday School at church does.  For example, at church, we covered Moses’s birth, God calling Moses, the plagues, Passover, and the parting of the Red Sea all in one week.  In contrast, in BSF, we took six weeks to cover that material in BSF, piece by piece.  This week the story was about God telling Moses about the Promised Land, so there was really no narrative.  That gets difficult when I am trying to write up a story that someone less than two will understand. The up-side is that the process of trying to sort out what to say and how to say it to kids forces me to think about the Bible in new ways in order to get unstuck.

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