How imagining a real Art Room in Sunday School
inspired the creation of the entire Workshop Rotation Model
A few years ago, Neil MacQueen shared this story of how the Workshop Rotation Model came to be. You can read the full story here.
When a group of us sat down to discuss our problems and frustrations with our Sunday School, one of them was all the lessons that seemed to depend on simplistic craft projects, and how we couldn't get our teachers to use other creative media like games or drama.
Related to the "craft" and lack of creative methods was our frustration with the mountains of craft supplies each classroom had squirreled away in their classroom cabinets. We easily had hundreds of dollars worth of construction paper, scissors, and glue scattered across the building, and they kept asking for more.
When our group got talking about our "art" supplies, we realized there was no "art" being done in our classrooms. It was a lot of what I came to call "cottonball sheep and popsicle sticks." Barely above busy work, and it bored the older kids.
When we brainstormed what we loved about learning with art, we remembered the public school Art Room many of us had grown up with. It was a room full of exotic smells, messy tables, shelves full of exciting materials, walls covered wonderful art projects, and teacher who loved to do it all with us. --And we realized that we wanted that same kind of room in our Sunday School. We wanted an art room to teach Bible stories that created a sense of anticipation and possibilities. We wanted to teach with exciting materials and not construction paper. And we wanted an art room that had all the materials and setup at hand and we could get messy in.
As we brainstormed that Art room and how we could schedule all our kids into it, we realized we also wanted the same kind of room for all our audio-visual materials and equipment, which was inconveniently scattered across our building in classrooms and locked closets. And more importantly, we wanted a teacher who LIKED to use that equipment, rather than ignore it like most of our teachers were doing.
Once we wrote "Art room" and "A-V room" on the flipchart it was a short leap to add "Drama room" and "Bible Skills and Games room" -- because those were things we felt our teachers and curriculum were ignoring too. (We added "Music room" too but that later became "Computers" for scheduling reasons).
I drew the five rooms as five circles, and it just so happened that we had five elementary grade groups, so we came up with "rotating" the grade groups to a new workshop every week so that the kids got exposed to MANY ways to learn -- and teachers who were good at their teaching medium!
The last piece of the Rotation puzzle quickly arrived when we realized that:
- a new story every week was a resourcing nightmare for five different workshops
- a new story every week was no way to achieve Bible literacy with kids
- and changing the story every week was a preparation nightmare for teachers
The solution? What if we only changed the story every five weeks? Would they get bored? We didn't know the answer to that at first, but after the first rotation, we had our answer: They thrived! And when other churches tried our experiment, they found it worked for them too.
Here are two screenshots from Rotation.org's Rotation Presentations showing a "classic" four-group, four-workshops, four-weeks "Rotation."
