Hey everybody, I’m Lynne Howard and we are live right now with the Wonder Ink team. I am on the Wonder Ink team, and I just want to take a moment to introduce myself. I am a children’s pastor.

I’m located in Alabama, ‘roll tide,’ if we have any Alabama fans, and I am a children’s ministry leader, and I help create this awesome new curriculum that we are so excited to launch from David C Cook. And I work with a team of other people who are just like you.

They’re in children’s ministry and they love kids, and they love helping kids grow stronger in their faith. And so Wonder Ink is created and developed by a diverse team of people and practitioners who are in ministry. And we’re so, so excited to share it with you. We’re back again for another week. Last week we talked a little bit about the curriculum and the philosophy and the scope and sequence.

Welcome and Overview

And this week I’m going to go a little bit more in depth about how you can customize and build your lessons and prepare them for Sunday and send them to your volunteers. And it’s so easy and so simple, and I’m actually going to show you the online platform that we use to deliver this and customize the lessons. And I would love to have you check it out yourself.

You can sign up for a totally free trial. It’s not going to run out in a few weeks, or we’re not going to start charging you or anything like that. It’s completely free. You can use it for as long as you want, and you can access everything that is available in our curriculum for four weeks. You can see four lessons for all the age groups and the parent resources and the volunteer resources.

God knows me. Jesus loves me. The Holy Spirit leads me. And I am a child of God, so my life can tell God’s wonder.

Check Out 4 Weeks Free at WonderInk.org

So I invite you to check it out. We’re going to drop that link in the comments. But you can go to WonderInk.org to learn more about the curriculum and see the scope and sequence and see the philosophy. And you can sign up there for your free trial. So once you do that, then it will take you to a website where you can log in.

I’m actually going to share my screen and show you what it looks like so that we can make sure it is super clear and easy. And if you have any questions along the way as we’re going, feel free to drop them in the comments and we will come back to them and have a question and answer time. And we’ve got some of our team in the comments right now who will be happy to answer your questions and help you.

Kirsten’s here and she’s on our Wonder Ink team too, and we’ve got some other people as well. So if you have any questions as we’re going, feel free to drop them in the comments. Okay, so, I’m going to share my screen with you. When you first log in to your free trial of Wonder Ink then you’ll see this home screen right now.

Learn More About Wonder Ink

Now, if you have already been using Wonder Ink, then you may notice it looks a little bit different. We’ve done some updates and we’re super excited about them. We’re making it so streamlined and so intuitive for users. And so some of these changes here are with just the layout and making sure that it’s as easy as possible for all of our users. So this is the homepage. This is the Explore Wonder Ink page. And if you go here, you can watch these tutorial videos that show you how to do everything step-by-step, making it easy.

So they show you how to set up your church and sign up a parent and help you introduce Wonder Ink to your team. We’ve got scope and sequence videos, lesson walkthrough videos, and then we have videos about how to customize lessons and present them. But you can also view the scope and sequence here by going to this page.

Be Sure to Check it Out

We’ve got a full three year scope and sequence for you to look at. And we would invite you to check all of this out and just dig around in here and look at it for yourself. But what the first thing that we’re going to do this week is I’m gonna walk you through how to prepare your lesson for Sunday. So I’m using this in my church as a children’s ministry leader. And so I’m going to show you how I would use it and give you some tips and tricks.

So we’re going to go to the lesson series. It’s over here on the left, and you’re just going to click on the lesson series. Now, we release a new series for you, for all of our paid subscribers, on the 15th of every month. And they are there in plenty of time before you’re needing to use them. So you’ve got lots of time to prepare.

What’s Available

But we currently have available God’s Family for our paid users. This is recommended for September. God Rescues recommended for October. God Speaks is going to launch very soon. And that’s going to be your November series. And then our Christmas series Waiting for Jesus is coming soon. And our Hanging Out with Jesus is our next series for January. But for all people, this is the starter series. We recommend this as Be Wonder Filled is your starter series, and it’s the one that is free.

We try to give you everything that you could possibly need.

And it also introduces your church and your families and your kids to Wonder Ink into the four core values that we talked about last week. God knows me. Jesus loves me. The Holy Spirit leads me. And I am a child of God, so my life can tell God’s wonder. And so those are the core values of our curriculum.

And also these are the lessons in Be Wonder Filled. So when you click on the series Be Wonder Filled, you’re going to start by seeing the overview page here and it tells you a little bit more about the series and what the series is all about. And then there’s an invitation here.

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Wonder Ink’s 3-year, 52-week children’s ministry curriculum offers kids space to fully find their place in God’s Big Story. Children discover they are Known by God, Loved by Jesus, and Led by the Holy Spirit.

Lesson Invitation

Now, this invitation is something for yourself and your leaders to help you prepare your heart for letting God speak through you and letting God kind of take you to that place where you’re ready to teach this series.

So it’s kind of a devotional type of thing to take you deeper there. And then, if you’d like to see what the series is all about just quickly at a glance, you can click on your series scope and sequence. And this will show you the elementary and early childhood scope and sequence just for that series. This is a four part series.

Some of them are a little bit longer than four weeks, but they’re between four to six weeks for most of the series. And you’ll see that this gives you the information about what Bible stories the kids are learning, what the wonder truth is, and the word of wonder, which is our memory verse. And our early childhood, which starts with toddler and goes all the way up through preschool, and our elementary kids are always going to be learning the same Bible story and the same wonder truth in age appropriate ways.

So sometimes you’ll see some adaptations here to make them more age appropriate, but you can see all of that in the scope and sequence.

Series Resource Library

And another thing that you can see for every series is you can see a resource library, and this is where you get all the things that you need for this series.

So we’ve got some images here that you can check out. But we’ve got some documents that you can check out. But we can show you in the lessons here once you go into the lesson. We’ve got some series social media that you can use. You can post these on your church’s Facebook. We have all the graphics for you. We have some blank slides and graphics in case you want to create your own. And we have social media captions, and it’s super easy.

We try to give you everything that you could possibly need. So if we’re going to click on lessons, this is gonna be kind of the meat of what we’re going to go over today, and I’m gonna just briefly show you, but I would love to invite you to check out the lessons a little bit on your own.

boy lying on bed listening to music
Credit: Getty Images/DigitalVision/Rebecca Nelson

Copying Lessons

So one really, really cool feature is that you can do is you can make a copy of every lesson if you want to. You don’t have to, but if you want to make a copy of the lesson.

So what I have done is I have named it. This lesson one I named August 7th and lesson two I named August 14th. Lesson three I’m going to name August 21st and so on. So I’m going to put the dates on it. If you have different classes using it in different age groups, you can say kindergarten lesson seven.

You can make as many copies if you want. You can say kindergarten, August 7th; preschool, August 7th; preteens, whatever you want to name it. This is to help you. You can name them for your teachers if you’re going to use different teachers to teach different lessons. And this will be a really cool way for your volunteers to be able to log in and say, okay, I’m teaching on August 14th, so I want to look ahead of time.

So, I’ve already named this, but you can copy it and name it whatever you want. You can have a lot of different versions of each lesson if you want to. And there’s always gonna be an original that is also there at all times. That is untouched no matter how much, much you edit it. So that if you want to go back and go to the original, you always have that there.

Lesson Resource Library

So we’re going to click on this lesson and open it up here. And once we go into that particular lesson, then we also have a social media with each lesson. So we have a series social media and a lesson social media. This includes the wonder truth and some discussion questions, some interaction type of posts that you can do with your families. We’ve got a resource library. And inside the resource library, we’ve got all the documents here that you could need for this series.

You need to be doing what’s most important in your church, and that is hanging out with those kids and spending time with your volunteers and investing in people, in the real, true fruit of the ministry.

Family Resources

We’ve got a family communication guide. And so this is where you can open this up. It’s in Word, so you just open up Word on your computer. It’s got emails that you can copy and paste and literally put right into a template for your parents. If you send out weekly or monthly parent emails, or if you wanna put it into a newsletter, it’s all right there for the series.

Volunteer Resources

We’ve got volunteer communication guides. Again, simple copy and paste what we’ve already given you, tweak it, add your own stuff. We’ve got a supply list and I’ll show you really quickly a preview of this, but you can download this and it includes all the supplies for every possible activity that you could do in that entire lesson.

So you can look at them all ahead of time and say, okay, well we only want to do things that are already in our supply room, so we’re gonna do this, this, this, and this. Or you can order your supplies if you need to. But I will tell you this, we try, very intentionally and strategically, to keep the supplies at a minimum. So, I mean, it may look like a lot, but we try to keep it so that it should be all super easy to prepare.

You are not going to have to spend hours going to the store every week and ordering things every week to get weird, crazy items for these lessons.

Downloadable Lessons

We’ve also got Word versions of the lesson if you want to download it that way. We’ve got the full PDF of the lesson. If you just want to print it off and say, put them in a binder, give them to your volunteers ahead of time, just straight up not using the portal, you can do that as well. They’re right here. It’s all laid out for you as a full lesson.

So we’re on lesson two of the Be WonderFilled series.

More Family Resources

We also have parent papers. I’ve had a few people ask me this, do you have parent take home sheets? And yes, we do. And this is how I print them in my church.

It’s two pages, but I print them front and back. So I only give a parent one page and they’ve got your Bible story. They’ve got a link to the video if you want to attach this to your email. And so they can watch the family Bible story video at home. We’ve got the memory verse here, a link to a Spotify playlist and conversation starters.

We’re gonna go a little bit more in depth about engaging with parents next week. But I just wanted to let you know that this is here, it’s downloadable, it’s printable. You can attach it to an email. You could put it on flyers or put it on a newsletter, however you want to use it in your church. And this is also customizable on the website, but that is for next week.

Lesson Resources and Printables

Then we’ve got all your printables here for the lesson. So during the lesson, you’re going to be linked to various principles, and those are all available here if you wanna download them. And we have PowerPoint slideshows say, if you’re using, Playlister or Pro Presenter or PowerPoint to show your series and your lessons on Sundays, you can download the PowerPoint slideshow. You can simply import those into Pro Presenter. It works great. So all of this is available in the series library, um, the resource library for each lesson.

Customizing Your Wonder Ink Lessons

All right, so now we’re going to go back to the lesson and I want to show you taking a deeper dive at how you get into this lesson and kind of make it your own, and how I prepare it for my volunteers as well. So you click on the lesson.

And then one thing that is really cool here that I have never seen another curriculum do, and I love this. You can toggle between age groups. So say, we’ll choose early childhood. This is for my preschool lesson. And you can choose which time, which amount of time you have. So, say you only have 60 minutes in your service. We have pre-populated and pre-chosen a lesson for you with all of the activities that we think would work best in a 60 minute time lesson. Or if you only have 30 minutes, there you go. It’s done for you. It’s easy, it’s ready to go.

You can customize it, you can tweak it, you can use it as is. It’s so fast, it’s so simple because we know that you need to be doing what’s most important in your church, and that is hanging out with those kids and spending time with your volunteers and investing in people in the real true fruit of the ministry.

That’s your job. And so our job is to make it easy for you by making Sundays as seamless as possible so you don’t even have to spend too much time on them. So you can do what’s important for you.

Diving into A Lesson

We’re going go back, because I personally like to see everything there. So I’m going to go back to the 75 minutes and then I’ll show you how you can take things out and how you can kind of customize it for you. So we’ve got the toddler lessons right here. We’ve got our elementary lessons. We’re going to go back to the elementary lesson.

This is lesson two of the Be WonderFilled series. And the first thing you see here is a very simple overview at-a-glance of everything that’s included in this lesson. That’s every activity, everything that you’re going to do with a brief description here.

That’s just to help you kind of see the flow and the layout as we talked about last week. Just a quick review. There are four key sections in every lesson. We open with the curiosity time, with the fun and the experiments and sparking their curiosity.

And then we have the belief time, which is the deep dive into the Scripture. And then we have our faith sections, kind of your more small group time, like helping kids connect with each other and connect with God. And then the identity section is the closing section. And this is where kids have an opportunity to have a time with God and encounter with Him and to worship and respond to what they have just learned. So those are the four sections.

You can see here all the activities that are included in that lesson.

For Leaders

And then we have our For Leaders section. This is really for you and for your volunteers. And this invitation is a devotional, it’s a time to get your heart right and help you prepare to lead and teach this lesson and for God to internalize these truths within you and your leaders. You can print, you can copy these into your leader email every week if you want to.

You can read these to your volunteers in a pre-service type of volunteer prayer time or huddle and kind of help and inspire them. You could even print them out and put them in a book to make like a devotional book for volunteers and then they can lead devotions as well together or do a small group time with your volunteers.

It’s endless ideas of what you could use this for. And then we have the Foundation Building Blocks, which is a really cool section that gives you and your leaders the biblical background and context for that Bible story. And I have learned so much from reading this, you know, we are not all Bible scholars. Some of us may be, but most of us are not Bible scholars.

And this is written by people who have studied the Bible and can help give you a little bit of background so that you are ready for that Bible story and you know what’s going on. And so that’s the For Leaders section.

Curiosity

And then if you move into the Curiosity section, so I wanna show you here, this is really cool. You can see everything that’s included in the lesson, but it’s totally customizable.

You can tweak it. So say we want to change the welcome question: Who loves you? How do you know? We could say share about a friend you care about. And you can delete things, you can take things out, add your own questions.

Then we have these slides here, which I wanna show you this. You can pull this and make this bigger. These slides are pre-populated for you. You can show these slides while you’re teaching. But, let me show you this, if you need more room, you can click the full screen button and then you can see everything more.

You can add your own thoughts and ideas and this all saves in your version. And then you can always go back to the original version anytime you want to. But I’m going to go back to this so that’s the full screen version, so you can make it really big.

I want to show you that we’ve got the questions here. These tabs on the side are different parts of the lesson. Now, if you want to change the order up and you want to do the curiosity question first, and then you wanna do the stem experiment, you literally just drag and drop them wherever you want them. It’s very easy.

There’s More!

If you want to do them in a different section header, you can do that too. So if you want to take one of the curiosity activities and move it down here to the belief section, all we’re going to do is click on section over here on the right side and we’re going to move it into the belief section. And now that activity is going to appear in our belief section.

We’re going to type whatever we want in this box and then all of a sudden you have a slide that is totally customizable that you can show your kids.

So some of us have a whole time where we do rules in your children’s ministry. You can make your own activity to add to the lesson too. So this is how you do that. So you go to add item and then we’re going do a text. You can add, you can choose from the various icons here. And we are going to add the rules.

So we’re going to type in rules for kids and then you can type whatever you want. You can add your own images to this.

You can add your church logo, you can add videos, you can add your own background. You can add if you have a missions or an offering or collection time for kids. If you have different memory verses, you can change the memory verses. It is all completely customizable and it’s all done for you.

Mom pushing son on a swing
Credit: Getty Images/Stone/Jordan Siemens

See All Your Edits

So I love this web platform and I love how easy we make it for you. You can teach right from this platform here if you want to and I’ll show you that in just a second. All right, I’m going to go back here to our lesson and show you how that appeared so that you can see when we made those changes. You can click right on it.

I’m going to find my August 14th version and I’m going to go back to the lesson. And now that we are back to it, you can see all the changes that I made are right there with the rules for children’s ministry. It’s all how I had it. Alright, and then we’re gonna go down to the belief section and you can click on anything in the lesson and you can edit it and you can add your own stuff and you can use it also as is however you want to.

Or if you want to highlight something or tell a certain leader to lead one game, you can do that as well. Or if you want to pull something out and delete something, you just delete that. It will ask you (which I love), are you sure you want to delete that?

So, I just think that this is such a great way. This is going to elevate your ministry and make your time and make your life so much easier so that you can use your time, instead of spending hours and hours and hours pouring over the lessons and circling things and crossing things out. You can just do it all right here.

Choosing Activities and Resources

So what I do is I go through the whole series ahead of time and I choose which activities I’m going to do, look at my supply list, look at my volunteers, and I do the tweaking.

It really does not take long at all. You’ve got your small group questions here. We’ve got questions for older kids and questions for younger kids. So you can do one version and take out the older kids’ questions and then send this lesson just to your younger kid volunteers and then do another version for your older groups if you want to do that.

We’ve got bonus activities here. So you can say, I only want to do activity number two for this lesson. I’m going to delete the others. So I only have activity two to show up, but say I actually wanna do activity two during my curiosity time, because I know we’re going to have extra time there. I’m going to move it up to curiosity. So now we’ve got a bonus game that is in our curiosity section. Do you see how easy this is? I am so excited and I love this so much.

Bible Story Video

Then we also have our Bible story video. And by the way, every lesson includes a Bible story video, and we also have interactive ways to tell the Bible story. So if your teachers only want to show it on a video and they don’t want to teach the Bible story live, we’ve got you covered.

If your teachers want to teach it live and read it with the kids and do an interactive version, we’ve got you covered for every single lesson. And so we provide both options and it’s all there ready to go for you.

You can download the videos or you can play it right from here. You can make it full screen. I’m not going to show you this whole video, I just wanted to show you that it’s here, and that it’s awesome. And you can add your media right here.

You can select from the library if you want to do a countdown video, you can add the countdown video as well, that we provide. We’ve got series bumpers, so if you wanna have a bumper video, we’ve got you covered there too.

Presenting Your Lessons

And you can share this so you can also teach this lesson live in your church if you have a HDMI hookup into your computer or you have an external monitor or a screen, we have a way called Present Mode.

And Present mode is really cool because I’m going to show you this here. It will pop up on your screen and this is what your teachers and your kids and everyone in your classroom will see. But we give you the ability on another tab, on this tab right here. So I would drag this onto my other screen to control it.

And if you want to minimize so you can see what they see and every time you click the next button here as you’re teaching, the people are seeing what you’re putting on the screen. So I just think that’s really, really cool and that is an awesome way to present and to teach these lessons. And so you can teach them that way, but you can also print them out here.

You can email [email protected] with any of your questions!

Sharing with Volunteers

So you just click the download lesson button and whatever you have done as you’ve been customizing it in this website, it will download. And you have a PDF right there. So say you are one of those people that likes to teach from paper or your leaders like to teach from paper, you print it out, you’ve got it right there, makes it so easy for them.

And then one more other way that you can share these lessons with your volunteers is you can click the share button right here and this will take you to a link that is a mobile link.

If you click Send Link to Your Email, then it will automatically send that mobile link to your email that you have used to sign up for Wonder Ink. Or you can copy it to your clipboard. And I’m actually going to have do a little trial, a little test here. I have Kirsten, one of our Wonder Ink team members, who is going to drop that link into the chat of our Facebook group right now.

And I invite you all to click on it on your phone. Don’t do it on your computer. Well, you can do it on your computer, it’ll look like a mobile view. Click it on your phone and then you can actually pull up the lesson and scroll through and see the lesson that we have created for week two. And so if you wanna send this to your volunteers, they don’t even have to be Wonder Ink team people.

They don’t have to be signed up for Wonder Ink. Any one of your volunteers can click this link on their phone and scroll through and teach the whole lesson. They won’t be able to do the video from their phone, but you can send them a link to the video as well. And so they’ll have all the activities and all the small group questions and the crafts and the discussions and the games and everything that you have just put on your lesson and your volunteers can see that as well.

Time for Review

So that is how you can can customize the lesson, build it, teach it in present mode. You can download it, you can attach that download to an email for your volunteers. And then you can also give all of your volunteers. So let’s say you have four Sunday school teachers, you can give them all access as users to your Wonder Ink account, and then invite them to come onto this website, send them the link to the website.

They can log in from anywhere and find their lesson and look at it and customize it themselves if you want them to. Or they can just see what you’ve already customized for them so you don’t have to email it to them. You can just tell them to log onto the website at any time. They can look ahead, say they know that they’re the first of every month, they can look ahead over the next several months, find their lesson and prepare for it on their own.

And so I just think that that makes it so easy for them and it makes it so easy for you as a children’s ministry leader to prepare and to empower your volunteers and to share this with them. And we also have tons of parent resources and tons more that you can actually do in this web portal.

And we’re going to show you more tips and tricks and we’re going to show you how you can make your ministry even better. But we’re going to talk more about that. We’ll be back next week. I just want to let you know that we have a wonderful volunteer or we have a wonderful support team that’s here to help you and answer your questions anytime you need.

Email Us Your Questions

You can email [email protected], we’re going to put this in the chat too: [email protected]. If you have any questions or can’t figure out something or can’t find something in our web portal, you can email them and they’ll be glad to help you and you can leave your questions in the comments too.

Events

But before we go, I wanted to share something with you that I am so, so excited about.

This is an event that is for all of our paid subscribers. So, this is not included on the free trial, but our curriculum includes one family event for every quarter. So we’ve got one fall type of family event, a Christmas family event, an Easter family event, and a summer family event every year that’s already done for you.

All you have to do is put on the event, we give you everything that you need to plug and play and do this event. And the one that we have coming up, I’m so excited, I’m actually preparing it right now for my church. And this is our Back to School event, but it’s also an event to introduce all the families in your church and the kids and volunteers to Wonder Ink. To let them know what it’s all about. It’s fun.

Everything Included

We’ve got snacks, we’ve got a schedule, we’ve got a video, a teaching time, games, decorating ideas, flyers, and invitations.

We’ve got postcards, we’ve got a script for you. Anything you need to promote for this event, a volunteer list, a registration form, it’s already done for you so you can have this event in your own church. So I’m making these flyers and I made some backpack tags because we are going to do a backpack blessing at ours, at my church at this event.

And this is all included in the Be WonderFilled experience for you. But we may, I made these backpack tags for all the kids in our church that reminds them of the affirmations of our core values, who they are in God. I am a wonder.The Holy Spirit leads me. Jesus loves me. So I made these today and I’m so excited to give them to our kids on Sunday and host the Be WonderFilled event at my church.

And you can host it in your church too. This is for all the people who are Wonder Ink subscribers. And it’s a really, really exciting event. And this is just a way to introduce everyone to the journey, to the Wonder Journey.

Try It Out

So I hope you get a chance to check it out and we hope that you will try Wonder Ink for yourself and you’ll love it. But, I want to see if we have any questions here and just take a few moments to answer some questions.

I will go more in depth next week about exactly how you can put your volunteers and parents into your Wonder Ink account. And I will show you on the web portal today. We were mostly covering in-depth how to prepare a lesson, but I’m going to show you more tips next week for sharing this with your team and using this with your team and some tips and tricks.

But, I also did want to mention too, because I’m seeing some questions come up here, that the recommended browser for this is Chrome. So we want to make sure that you’re using Chrome on your computer and then everything will look the best.

Let me see if we have any other questions here. I think Kirsten, you are on it answering those, questions and yes, making your own memory verse magnets, I do that too. I take, um, the memory verse images, which we give you, um, in the series graphics folder and you can laminate them and just put a little magnet sticker on the back and then I send them home with all my kids so they can put them on their fridge.

So this is not a memory verse magnet, but this is kind of how I make mine. So I just wanted to show you that is an option too. But, I think that’s all we have for you and I’m so excited for you to see Wonder Ink. And to use it. And if you have any questions then feel free to reach out to us or drop your comments here and we’ll see you next time. Hope you have enjoyed this. Bye everyone. Thanks.

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