Teaching Kids to Walk

A reader writes (regarding using my new book, We Make the Road by Walking, as a curriculum for VBS) …

I am so excited! Last Sunday, I tested the Walking VBS curriculum with a group of children [from our church]. The group was small and all of the children were under 8-which scared me at first. I had thought the curriculum would work best with children in 5th grade and above. I was blown away by their reaction.
We did a modified version of Chapter One. The kids loved the response prayers and I added a movement prayer to help with the wiggles. The children read the scripture. (I will admit that I modified it a little for ease of reading. Not my most scholarly move but in the interest of storytelling I did it.) They enjoyed that. The teaching part was more than they could listen to in the hour time. I think given a longer time period, they would have no trouble listening. The problem was not having enough time to process between scripture and lesson. I did modify the lesson for them. (I found that only slightly less intimidating than changing scripture 🙂 )
The parents and their teacher were so impressed that they have been calling all week to prepare for Sunday’s lesson. In the full VBS flow, we start with week 1 and then jump to chapter 27, 30, and 31. Day 5 is set aside as a mission in action day. The church will chose a mission where the children will be active participants. For tomorrow, we will be doing chapter 30. I streamlined it considerably because I want the children to have time to serve communion to one another. We got special permission for this from their church.
This has been a wonderful experiment so far. And, just so you know, there are two other churches who are interested in helping with field testing.

I’m very excited to hear about this as well … I’ll keep folks informed via this website as this project develops.