Jill Benson

The Garden, the Curtain and the Cross, and The Friend who Forgives from the Tales that Tell the Truth series are my favorite picture books for Easter. For devotionals, they aren't books, but I've used the Jesus Storybook Bible printable devotional for Lent, and Dwell's God's Big Easter Story for Holy Week. They would be great resources to print copies of and have them in your church library for families to take. The 2024 copy of the Jesus Storybook Bible Lent reading plan hasn't been released yet, but you can view last year's here. It would be great to have copies of the Jesus Storybook Bible for families to check out along with the resource. God's Big Easter Story is available to download from the Dwell at Home page. I've used Bitter & Sweet for my Lent devotions and think it would work well with older (middle or high school age) children.

The Easter and Lent pages of the Family Faith Formation toolkit also have some great resources!

Thanks for this great idea! We already have several ways we track the days in Advent, so I made envelopes just for the weekends during Advent. The Saturday envelopes have a fun activity we have scheduled for that day and the Sunday ones have a little description of that week's candle that we read as we light our Advent wreath at dinner. They look beautiful on the wall, were easy to make, and my kids love checking them each weekend to see what we have planned!

Hi Kristin,

There are some churches doing in person Sunday School with DWELL or DWELL Flex. If you'd like to connect with them, you could consider joining our DWELL Leaders Facebook group and asking this same question there.

If you're looking for curriculum to use, DWELL Flex is nice because if you end up going back to virtual you can continue using the same curriculum. It's designed to adapt to church, virtual or home learning. And it's free for CRC churches through DWELL Digital. You can find out more details about Flex on the DWELL website: DwellCurriculum.org.

Hi Melissa, What a great idea! My absolute favorite music for young kids is Rain for Roots cds. They are so well done. The three Dwell cds would also be great, whether you're using Dwell or not. You can view them at the very bottom of this page. My kids also love the Slugs and Bugs Sing the Bible cds. Hope you find something you like!

When I worked in Children's Ministry, I had a volunteer who organized all this for me. We had a huge supply closet and she organized all the supplies on shelves in that room. Each whole shelving unit had a letter and then the individual shelves on that unit had a number. She placed the craft items in different baskets and used circle stickers to mark where the item was stored on the basket. She also wrote down where everything was stored. For example if glue sticks were on the second shelving unit in and on the third shelf of the unit she wrote down, "Glue sticks B3" and then also put the glue sticks in a basket and placed a "B3" sticker on that basket. I typed all the information she had written down into Excel and printed out master lists organized by item name and by shelving unit, which we placed into the room. That might be a bigger system than what you're looking for, but it was very helpful! If you needed something you could just look it up on the list and then it told you which shelf it was on. We did have to clean it out about once a year though, as we had a lot of trouble with people not putting things back in the right place or leaving things in the room that didn't have a place. The volunteer that set it all up usually cleaned it out every summer for me.

I have the book And Social Justice for All by Lisa Van Engen. It has a chapter on race and at the end of the chapter includes discussion questions for different age groups (3-6, 7-11, 12+). It also has things you can do with those age groups (often the suggestion is reading a particular book together). I haven't read through the whole chapter (or the whole book), but what I've looked at has been very helpful!

Bret, I used to make journals for the kids graduating out of Children in Worship to help them engage with the service (since they were then joining "big" church). I created the layout, but I think you can also find some free options online. I think each page had a place for them to write the date, topic, passage, thoughts or questions they had and then left space for them to draw if they wanted to. At my church kids graduated from Children in Worship after 2nd grade so they were a little older. You may want to focus more on space for the child to draw if they are just leaving kindergarten.

We also handed out Bibles to those entering 1st Grade/graduating from Kindergarten as that seemed to correspond to when they were really focusing on reading in school. I used The Adventure Bible, but there's a whole list of options on the Bibles and Bible Storybooks page of the Family Faith Formation Toolkit. There are also some suggestions about how to celebrate various milestones in that tool kit. You can find those here: Milestones. I used the suggestion of having someone pick a verse to include in each child's Bible (from Celebrating the Milestones of Faith). Each parent sent me a verse they picked for their child, that I would include in the front of the Bible. I also read that verse aloud when I gave out the Bible. It was a really nice way to make the experience more personal for the kids.