One of the most important things about children’s ministry is that it’s not just for Sunday. If all kid’s are getting in faith formation is an hour on Sunday, then they’re missing out on so many opportunities for growth in their faith. And we want to help take it beyond just Sunday.
Imagine kids and families growing together every day, diving into the Bible together, laughing together, having fun, playing games, doing activities, devotions, having discussions, and growing their faith together.
It’s our desire to make it easy for children’s ministry leaders with tools and resources to communicate with parents. If there’s anything I’ve learned as a parent and as a children’s pastor that communicating and partnering with parents has to happen often, and it has to happen in a variety of different ways.
Parents are inundated with so many different things and information from school and sports and work and church, and so you cannot communicate enough with parents. In Wonder Ink, we want to help you communicate in a variety of different ways with parents and empower them and partner with them.
Partnering with Parents and Families: On the Site
When you first log in to WonderInk.org, you’ll land on our Explore Wonder Ink page.
From here, I’m going to show you how you can invite parents to be a part of your parent portal. In the parent portal, they would see something that we have crafted and created specifically for parents and kids to use during the week.
One of the most important things about children’s ministry is that it’s not just for Sunday.
Start by going to the “My Church” tab. Next go to the staff and parent registration link. And you’re just going to click that button and it will pop up. Next, copy and paste this unique link in an email to your parents. Next, all parents have to do is click this link, and then they can go to the signup page, and they can sign up. Once they do that, you’ll see the pending registrations in this section that you can then approve.
Now I am in our parent portal. This is our family portal for families and kids. And we really want to make it super fun and engaging to get parents and kids into this portal doing these activities, viewing these videos, and all of these abundance of resources and games.
I will talk more about them in a second. But I want to first switch back over to the admin side.
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.
Partnering with Parents and Families: Images, Communication, Video, and More
I first want to show you from the church side, from this part of the portal, what all we have included for parents and how we help you partner with parents. I’m going to show you how, I, as a children’s pastor, prepare for starting a new series with my families and all of the things that I would do.
I’m going to start with God’s family. And I’m going to go into the overview page for the series and I’m going to go into the resource library and show you that in the resource library. You’ll see the series image, if you want to drop that into your bulletin or your newsletter and we have a slide as well. If you want to put it on your big screens to announce it in church to let your parents know what’s coming.
We’ve also got a series family communication guide. Now this is a Word document. You can download this right from the resource library. You simply copy and paste, and can add your own part. We’ve highlighted the editable portion to make sure you add your own signature at the bottom. It’s an introduction to let families and parents know you’re about to start a new series.
You can literally copy and paste this into an email, put it in your church newsletter or put it on your website, your Facebook page, or however you communicate with parents.
And then we also have a series overview. If you want to print the series overview out, it tells everyone what the Bible stories are for each week. It tells them what the memory verses are for each week, and the Wonder Truth, which is like the big idea for each lesson.
And then we also have a church promotional video and an overview video. You can download these, you can link to these. They’re just short, quick, simple videos that you can use to show, to let everyone know what is coming up in your church.
Social Media, Memory Verses, and Wonder@Home
Another thing that I would do is I would go into the lessons and then I’m going to go into the social media section for each lesson. And we have all of these social media images ready to go for you. We also have captions for them. We’ve got family questions here. We’ve got the Bible story and the Wonder Truth and different things like that. And the memory verse. You can download all of those.
It’s our desire to make it easy for children’s ministry leaders to partner with parents and families all week long.
I will take the memory verse for each week and I make these little memory verse magnets for the families in my church. I just print them out, laminate them, cut them apart. It’s so easy. And then I take this magnet tape and I put a tiny little piece of magnet on the back. And then I give out memory verse magnets.
My families and the kids love them. And then another thing that we provide is we have the Wonder@Home documents that you can print off give them to the parents at the end of every week.
The memory verse is listed right here, a conversation starter, and a link to a playlist. And then we also have two hands-on interactive activities for every lesson to help families just connect and go deeper with what they’re learning that week. Very simple activities. Usually they’re very low on supplies, if any supplies. And they’re really fun activities.
You can also email these to parents.
Videos, Activities, and Quarterly Events
You can also go to the videos in the resource library for each lesson. We have an at-home version of the video, the Bible story video. And so you can find the elementary version or the early childhood version. You can copy the link, you can download it or copy the link and you can put that on your Facebook page or your website or send it to parents or embed it in an email. So they have the Bible story video that they can watch.
Lastly, every quarter there is a family event provided that you can host at your church. It has everything you need.
But now I want to take you a little bit more in depth into the parent portal and the family portal and how it works.
The Parent Portal
Anything you drag and drop into the Wonder@Home portion of the customizable lesson, will also update on the parent portal. And so, the parents can go through and do all of these activities. They can watch the Bible story video right here in the portal.
Parents have access to the worship songs that you’re singing so they can listen to them at home. We give them a YouTube playlist here. We have the Word of Wonder so they can practice the memory verse.
And so, this is just a really fun way to make it cool for the kids.
We’re adding more and more activities to the family portal and making it mobile friendly so that they can log in on their phones and on their iPads. I would encourage you to invite your families and encourage them to get into the portal.
The more you talk about it, the more you mention it on Sundays and communicate it, the more families and parents are going to be excited about doing it.
