How to Use Your Church’s Children’s Ministry Curriculum at Home

Stuck at home on a Sunday? Or choosing to homeschool your children, and want to include spiritual teaching too? Easily adapt your kids’ Sunday School Bible curriculum from church for use at home! Scroll down for a few simple tips on how to use your church’s children’s ministry curriculum at home.

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Teach the Bible to your kids at home

Just because you can’t make it to church doesn’t mean you should skip your kids’ Bible lesson!

And if you’re choosing to homeschool, you should definitely include biblical teaching in your kids’ school day.

But I know it can be overwhelming to figure out exactly how to teach the Bible to your kids at home. So I want to make a SUPER easy suggestion to you–simply teach the same Bible curriculum your kids would use at church.

Instead of finding some kind of specialized Bible lessons to use at home, just adapt your church’s Sunday School or children’s ministry curriculum for your own kids!

Here’s how…

How to use church curriculum at home

Don’t be overwhelmed or discouraged! This is actually an exciting chance to tweak basic Bible lesson plans to your individual child or children. And the more personalized a lesson is, the more likely it is to have an effect in your kids’ lives. That’s the goal. 😉

So be encouraged. Be excited. And let’s make that generic Bible curriculum work for you!

Below, I’ll go into detail about how to use your church’s children’s ministry curriculum at home, but here are five basic principles to keep in mind:

• Get your kids involved.
• Don’t be afraid to make substitutions.
• Take advantage of printables.
• Individualize activities.
• Keep it simple.

Just apply these five basic tips on adapting Sunday School curriculum for home use, and you’ll find it’s actually rather easy to share the Word of God with your own children!

1) Get your kids involved

One of the HUGE advantages to teaching the Bible at home is the small group size. Instead of focusing on wrangling a crowd, you can embrace the chance to let your kiddoes be more involved than ever!

Be sure to take advantage of any time the curriculum says to ask for a volunteer… and also look for even more opportunities to let your kids be involved.

If the curriculum gives you a demonstration to do, let one of your kids do it. If the curriculum tells you to hold up a visual aid, let a child hold it. And so on.

In short, take advantage of the easy chance to let your kids be more involved in the lesson than ever!

2) Don’t be afraid to make substitutions

Not everything will work as easily at home as in a Sunday School classroom. You might not have a projector to display pictures, or a whiteboard to draw on. You might not have access to a closet full of teaching aids.

But you can still easily achieve the same effects. Use a computer screen or an iPad for digital images. Write on a window pane with a dry-erase marker. If you don’t have the teaching aids that the curriculum suggests, feel free to use what you do have.

And you can always improve on the curriculum’s suggestions, too! If your Bible lesson says to show the kids a picture of a sheep, use a plastic or stuffed animal instead. If it says to display a crown of thorns, grab a stem from a rose bush and twist it into a circle.

You aren’t limited by teaching the Bible at home. Actually, you have MORE chances to make your Bible lessons fun and interesting to your kiddoes at home!

3) Take advantage of printables

The part of your church’s children’s ministry or Sunday School curriculum that’ll be easiest to use at home are the printables–worksheets, coloring pages, take-home sheets.

So if your Bible curriculum includes a student workbook or coloring pages, make sure to print those out and use them!

When you’re adapting your church’s Bible curriculum for home use, take full advantage of those printable pages. They will be the easiest part of each lesson to use at home, by far.

4) Individualize activities

Okay, so the trickiest part about adapting Sunday School curriculum for home use will be the activities. Many times, those are written for at least a small group of kids to complete together.

You might find it challenging to play some church games at home if you only have a few kids!

But don’t let that keep you from doing the activities that are written into your children’s ministry curriculum at home. You’ll just have to be a little bit creative about adapting them for home use.

Here are a few ideas for how to adapt Bible activities for individual kids instead of a crowd:

• Compete against yourself. If the instructions say for kids to race or otherwise compete against each other, just do the activity multiple times and challenge your kids to improve on their results each time.
• Compete against the clock. Another option is to set a timer, and then challenge kids to successfully complete the activity before the time runs out.
• Complete the activity together. Kids truly LOVE it when Mom plays together with them. And if you’re cooped up at home, you might find that you feel better if you do a little playing like a kid! So be willing to jump in and do activities together with your kiddoes.

5) Keep it simple

Most of the Bible curriculms that churches use are overly fancy. Kids have short attention spans and lots of wiggles, so they need creative, engaging Bible lessons–but that doesn’t necessarily mean fancy.

I’ve been teaching Bible lessons for years, and often I don’t use anything more than a few black-and-white printable images and a handful of creative demonstrations to illustrate my main points. And my kids still soak it in.

I’ve seen it work, and it’s cheap and easy. All the Bible curriculums that I offer follow the same pattern–including my popular Armor of God lessons and my Fruit of the Spirit curriculum.

So don’t feel obligated to make your Bible lessons “fancy.” Even if your church’s curriculum is very sophisticated, you can always strip it down to the bare minimum. Use your own common sense and your own creativity.

And enjoy “passing the faith along” to your kiddoes!