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How does your Children’s Ministry prepare your 5th/6th graders for Junior High? It’s not an easy question to answer. Often times we as Children’s Ministry Leaders don’t give it much thought until a couple of months before they are supposed to move up to our church’s Junior High Ministry. We don’t have a super great strategy at HDC yet but we’ve taken one small step to be more strategic about preparing our kids and their families for this transition.
At the beginning of their sixth grade year, we give families the option to let their kids check themselves out. Like I said, it’s not a super innovative idea and it’s certainly not the only thing that we do, but it is a meaningful step that is doable for both kids and parents. Here’s the letter we sent out that explains our thought process behind this idea:
Our elementary team is privileged to work with sixth graders at Beach House. We see this last year in our ministry as a transition year where students are getting ready to go into Junior High.
We are excited to give parents a new option that we think will help you, as a family, make that transition. In Junior High, students have the freedom to go to their service and leave when it is over. That is quite different from what you and your child is used to doing. We still want sixth graders to check in to Beach House as normal, but you, as parents, will have two options for checking out your child:
The first option is you can check them out like normal. Drop them off, keep the claim ticket, and bring it back at the end of service to pick up your child.
The second option (the one we’re excited about) is to let your sixth grader check himself/herself out when you feel they are ready. All you need to do is give your child their claim ticket. Once the adult service is finished, we will let those sixth graders with their own claim ticket check out. The rest can be checked out normally.
We are starting this new checkout option this weekend. We are really excited about this and hope you will be too! Feel free to contact us; we would love to answer any questions you may have.
What are some of the things that you do to prepare the kids and families at your church for the change to Junior High?
–Jeff
