Wise Guys

First night of reg­u­lar kids’ church tonight! We have an English/Spanish Bible study and music ses­sion every Wednesday, and we’ve been madly mov­ing fur­ni­ture about in order to cre­ate a ded­i­cated kids space. A room on the bot­tom floor is being set up for the process. We’ll set a TV/PS2/GameCube in the closet. We’re talk­ing about table options — pos­si­bly a low table arrange­ment so that the kids can sit on the floor while we have lessons, crafts, and movie times.

Starting in January, we will be using the Wise Guys pro­gram. It invites kids to learn prin­ci­ples and verses and apply them in their daily lives each week. Different activ­i­ties let them earn Wise Guys cur­rency with which they can pur­chase items from the Wise Guys store. Handy!

For now, though, I’m work­ing with basic crafts, games, movies (Veggie Tales!), and mem­o­riza­tion activ­i­ties. That’ll get us through the hol­i­day sea­son while we trans­late Wise Guys into Spanish. Wednesday is mostly in English, because our crowd is a mix­ture of grin­gos and Spanish-speakers who want to learn/practice/improve their English. Still, I’m not about to bring a bunch of chil­dren in a room and jab­ber at them in an unknown lan­guage! By incor­po­rat­ing English ele­ments we can sup­ple­ment the English they learn in their schools and help them with their early lan­guage acquisition.

Tonight was a suc­cess; the kids had fun and the grownups liked see­ing the kids have a good time.