I am so pleased to be with you today to talk to you about what Hear It, Watch It, Experience It is and why it’s important. So, if you’ve been around for a while and you’ve been checking out Wonder Ink or you’re a current subscriber, you probably already know what I’m going to talk about. But for those of you that may be new with us, Hear It, Watch It, Experience It is a model for how we teach Scripture in Wonder InK.
In every Wonder Ink lesson, we have four main sections. We have one called Curiosity, Belief, Faith, and Identity. And our Hear It, Watch It, Experience It approach to teaching Scripture falls under our Belief section.
When you think about those four sections of a lesson, curiosity is helping what the appetite of kids for, “Oh, what could we be learning today?” We have an activity included in that section to help them get thinking, to get the wheels turning on what could we possibly be learning about God today.
And then we always end our Curiosity section with our declaration of who God is and knowing who we are as His kids. And then that leads us into our Belief section, which is what I’m going to talk about today.
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.
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.
Diving into the Bible
Belief is really where we are digging into Scripture the most, where we’re opening Bibles, where we’re reading part of the story, where we’re then watching it in a video, and then we’re experiencing it in a multisensory way. So, whether you have 75 minutes to 90 minutes on a Sunday morning, or if you have maybe 30 to 40 minutes like I do on a Sunday morning, I’m looking at how can I engage kids in God’s Word in different ways.
That’s where Hear It, Watch It, experience it came from when we were developing Wonder Ink. We wanted to make it possible for us to be approaching Scripture in different ways to help kids who have different learning styles.
We also knew how important repetition is when we’re teaching. So, how do we keep coming back to a concept? How do we keep introducing maybe something new to go along with that concept and to meet the needs of the kids in our midst? That’s where this was born.
We wanted to make it possible for us to be approaching Scripture in different ways to help kids who have different learning styles.
Hear It
The Hear It portion is when we are helping kids open their Bibles. Whether you’re having a physical Bible for each kid and they’re opening it together or you’re in small groups and you have a leader with a Bible, maybe you’re doing it from the front. But what’s really important about the Hear It portion of this model is that the children are hearing it, right? That they’re hearing it from Scripture, from your preferred translation. So, we’re showing kids where it falls in the biblical storyline.
With Hear It, we’re also building in biblical literacy because we are helping kids know where the story falls when they open the books of the Bible. When I’m opening my Bible, how do I find it? This is where we’re doing that.
We’re also helping building context of where this is falling in the meta-narrative or God’s Big Story. Where does it fall in that big timeline?
In the Hear It portion; we are going to give you a segment of verses to read. You’re not going to read the whole thing. Here’s the thing, not everyone is an auditory learner. Not everyone can just sit still and take it in. So we’re going to give you portions of the Scripture to read, knowing that you’re going to choose another medium to help kids know the story, to have them be able to enter into the story.
We rarely give you a section of Scripture that you’re going to be reading the entirety of the story. Sometimes it’s, “Ooh, how can we get them ready to hear this, the beginning of the story and then what could possibly be happening? We could do it as an introduction.”
You could read the beginning verses of a story and say, “I wonder what’s going to happen next. Let’s go check out more of God’s Big Story through our video.” Or “Let’s discover more of the story by doing our experience at script together.” So, you can do that in a lot of different ways.
How we’ve written it is we hope that every week you are opening the Bible with your kids, whether it’s in a large group teaching segment or you’re doing it in small groups where you can have a leader with kids talking through the different sections, helping kids open that up, or you’re opening the Bible when you’re doing your memory verse.
We just want to make sure we’re building in where they’re hearing God’s Word aloud and seeing how you can find it and physically opening Bibles. So that is where Hear It comes from.
Each piece in a Wonder Ink Lesson is building together their entire experience.
Watch It
Then we have Watch It. In Every Wonder Ink Lesson, we have the option of a video. So whether that’s an early childhood or elementary video, we are crafting the Bible story in an engaging way that’s about three, three to five minutes long. Depending on the Scripture, it might be a little longer or a little shorter than that.
But it’s meant to be a way of seeing the story through a video medium. So it could be done through illustration, could be live action. But regardless of the style of video, what that video is doing is helping children see the story.
For instance, we’re going to be going into the Problems and Promises series coming up.
And you’re going to see that that style of video is live action for your elementary kids. So you’re going to meet a storyteller and they’re going to be telling the story, and then you’re going to see it played out through imagery. And that is going to help kids take what they just heard when you opened the Bible and read part of the Scripture.
Now they’re going to help visualize it because they’re seeing it in a new way. So how Hear It, Watch It, Experience It works is that it’s building together. Think of it as interlocking bricks like Lego, how you can either build up, you can build to the side. Each piece in a Wonder Ink Lesson is building together their entire experience.
Video is just a piece of that. So you could open your Bible and then watch the video, or you could open your Bible and then head into what we call Experience It.
Experience It
In every Wonder Ink lesson, we have a section called God’s Big Story Script in Early Childhood or the Experience It Script in Elementary & Preteen. And what that means is this is the multisensory option for teaching it live. And so, what you’ll notice in a Wonder Ink lesson is that our video content and our Experience It Script are using the same narrative, meaning the language that they’re using in the video and in the Experience It Script match.
We did that on purpose because we wanted to make sure that regardless of what medium you’re able to do in your time on Sunday or maybe on a Wednesday night, that it was telling and using the same language of the story that regardless of what medium you choose, they’re hearing the same thing and they’re using the same language. We wanted to make it easier for families to be able to talk about it at home.
So having that similar language is important, especially if they’re watching the video at home and they did the Experience It Script there with you on a Sunday or Wednesday night when you’re in that teaching space.
For Experience It, it varies each week how they’re going to be doing it. It could be a dramatic retelling, it could be through drawing, it could be through a group project of some sort, it could be that kids are acting out different scenes in smaller groups.
There are a variety of different ways how you can teach that. And that is what the Experience It Script is meant to do. It’s meant to engage kids with their body, with their mind, with their heart, with their soul. Like they are, we’re engaging them in different ways because we know kids learn in different ways. So if I just heard it and then I just watched in a video, well, now I want to enter into the story in a new way.
And that is how Experience It Scripts were written. They are to help kids enter it in a new way. So why is this important? Well, all kids learn differently and repetition is important. Helping kids hear it in different ways is going to help them, help solidify it in their brain and then it’s going to make that connection from their head and their heart as God does that work in them.
Regardless of what order you do it in, you are showing the importance of meeting with God.
Building Together
We’re meeting with God when we do this. So the beauty of that is we’re never doing this alone. So when you build upon those pieces together, when you bring those together, we believe that it helps kids build a stronger faith because not only are they going to build confidence in opening the Bible, they’re going to know that they can trust that you before them when you are teaching them Scripture, when you are teaching them the story. They can go back and say, “This is what Scripture says, and now I understand it.” So wanting to give them more space and time on a Sunday morning to go in and engage the text in different ways.
Now you get to Hear It, Watch It, and Experience It every week. And I think what God is doing in and through your ministries is incredible. No matter how you’re using it, no matter the ways that you’ve structured your ministry, God is working. And that is the beauty, that is the beauty of being able to do ministry with God, to see lives transformed.
And so, I just encourage you to check out how can you be engaging kids in God’s word in different ways in your teaching, whether that’s through discussion or hearing scripture read aloud together, watching the video and then discussing it with our small group questions, or maybe your main telling is let it. Let’s dig in and let’s act this out and enter the story in this way. And then maybe you hear the story a bit later in your small group where they open the Bible and say, “What we just experienced, this is what God’s Word says.”
Regardless of what order you do it in, you are showing the importance of meeting with God.
That is what it’s all about.
Friends, as you are teaching, I pray that you are able to meet with God in a whole new way, that each time you enter into His Word, that you enter into a story, that your first question is, “God, I, I know You are here. Reveal Yourself to me. Where are You in this story?” And that He would meet you in that, that He would meet every single kid in that.
Have fun discovering who God is as you do ministry with Him—entering this next week and into weeks to come. If you have any questions, we are here for you. You can email us at [email protected]. Blessings.
