Family Adventurers Sabbath School
Family Adventurers is a new option for sabbath school because it incorporates the whole family, it's "Family Sabbath School."
Though Adventurers has in most churches been traditionally a meeting where parents dropped off their children, it was not designed to be this way. Adventurers was designed for parents to accompany their children, participating with them in the activities for each meeting. Here was the goal:
The Adventurer program was created to assist parents in their important responsibilities as a child’s primary teachers and evangelizers. The program aims to strengthen the parent/child relationship and to further the child’s development in spiritual, physical, mental, and social areas. Through the Adventurer Program, the church, home, and school can work together with the parent to develop a mature, happy child.
FAMILY JOURNAL TIME
To engage each member of the sabbath school family, we suggest that toward the culmination of each class, a 5-10 minute time here should be set for "Family Journal Time." This is a time for each individual family to get together to think of three things they'll do as a family the coming week to put what they learned into practice, putting "legs on the lesson" so to speak.
INCORPORATE SOCIAL MEDIA
To encourage further engagement, you can encourage families to video and post their Family Journal Time goals on social media. These videos can also be played during announcement time or during the church service to highlight what families or groups of families are doing to practice and grow their faith together.
GROWING YOUR SABBATH SCHOOL
If your goal is to grow children's sabbath school in your church, this may be a good option. As our club leadership team says:
If you don't have kids in your church, start Adventurers and the kids will come.
Advertising and recruitment for Adventurers is a lot more natural than for sabbath school. Because this is an outlet for family time, it can be advertised on social media and outside signage as such.
CURRICULUM
Below is the curriculum for Adventurers broken down into each club division. Note the age appropriateness listed for the curriculum. Each division has 22-23 lessons. To stretch the curriculum to last an approximate year there are multiple options:
- You can divide each class into two sabbath's as the curriculum for each class has enough content to fill 1.5-2hrs.
- You could keep rotating between the three class curriculums for each age group.
- Another idea is do the Adventurers class one week and then the following week do parents and kids separately - using traditional lessons for the kids or content that was not covered in the previous class, and have the parent class be an opportunity for discussion among parents about how ministry at home is going, Biblical parenting topics, etc. giving parents time and an outlet to talk.
KINDERGARTEN:
(Little Lambs, Eager Beavers, & Busy Bees)
AGES 4-6
PRIMARY
(Sunbeams, Builders, & Helping Hands)
AGES 7-9
