Hey, my name is Kristen Hitchcock, and this is Lynne Howard. And we’re part of the team that created Wonder, Ink. And we often get asked, you know, how does this work? How did you come up with the three year scope and sequence? And as many of you already know, Wonder Ink is based on four core values: God knows me, Jesus loves me, the Holy Spirit leads me, and I am a child of God.

All of our weekly lessons are enriched with these values to help kids enter God’s Big Story and see their place in it. So with that, we thought through how our scope and sequence should reflect that and reflect those core values.

And our scope and sequence is built around these four values.

So that each year is broken up into sections that have lessons that point to these core values. And our lessons are actually grouped into series. Some are four weeks, some five, some six, and even up to eight weeks.

God’s Big Story

First, each series and the series are based on biblical themes to help kids connect the Bible stories to one another and to the theme of what those are teaching them about God, as well as to connect each story as a part of God’s Big Story. So each year of our three year scope and sequence covers the main stories in the Bible, from Old Testament to New Testament, and they go in order. And it’s a balanced version so that we have a balanced number of stories from the Old and New Testament each year.

Sharing From the Old Testament and New Testament

And also the themes that you might see in the first year are themes such as God’s Family and God Rescues. These are from the Old Testament, and then from the New Testament we have Hanging Out with Jesus, Miracles, and a lot more themes like that. But one really cool thing about our curriculum is the scope and sequence also includes series for you that are already built in for the holidays.

So the two major holidays in our church year are the Christmas season/Advent and Easter. And we have series in those that are extra special because they actually include stories from both the Old Testament to the New Testament to help kids tie all of those stories together so that they can see how it connects in God’s Big Picture.

Awesome, and one of the things that we often get asked is about, well, okay, I can see in your scope and sequence year one where we’re going, but what do years two and three look like? So what we’d love to do is actually share a glimpse of our editorial calendar of what years two and three, what you can expect for what years two and three are going to bring. And so with that, I’m going to share what our editorial calendar looks like.

Scope & Sequence Year 2 and 3

So for years two and three, as Lynne mentioned, we’re talking about going through the Bible in order from Old to New to cover the major Bible stories that we know, that we want our kids to know … who God is and who they are in Him. And so with that, Lynne, I’d love to have you walk us through a bit of what year two looks like.

All of our weekly lessons are enriched with our four core values to help kids enter God’s Big Story and see their place in it.

Year 2

Yes, that’s right. So we’re starting year two. We start, the curriculum starts in the fall. You can mix it up however you want. Each of these series can be moved around. But we recommend starting with Think Again. This starts in the Old Testament and covers Cain and Abel and all the storyline of the judges and the Israelites and the wilderness. And then you see a series like Problems and Promises.

And then we’ve got Kings and Prophets coming up there in the fall. And you can see the Bible stories that are included there. And the Christmas series for year two is called The Jesus Family Tree. This is our Christmas series that starts with Abraham and Ruth and then takes you all the way through the New Testament to the family line of Jesus.

We’ve got The Heart of Jesus. This covers the be-attitudes and the sermon on the mount. We’ve got, What Did He Say and so these are some stories from the New Testament, and we also cover our Easter series. This is called Rescued. We’ve got Old Testament stories here all the way through to Jesus and the resurrection. We’ve got Transformed.

We’ve got The Power of Prayer. So we go through the New Testament here and we’ve got some series on the epistles. We’ve got Psalms and Proverbs. If we scroll down just a little bit, you can see more about that.

We’ve got the epistles there. We’ve got a Proverb series called Wise Up. And so that’s just a quick glance of year two. But one other thing that we want to make sure you know is that our early childhood and our elementary kids are learning the same Bible stories and the same truths about God.

This is so important for families who have kids all the way from toddler age group all the way up through the end of elementary. They’re all learning the same thing. We’ve got family discussion guides that can help you. We’ve got leader tips for all the different ages and parent resources, but more about that later. So then now let’s take a quick glance through year three and our scope and sequence.

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.

Year 3

And then year three starts, again, in the Old Testament. We go back to Genesis and we cover the story of Noah. We’ve got Faithful is our first series. And this covers people from the Old Testament who learned about God’s faithfulness. We’ve got the series called God with Us. And then We Have Victory is our next series that we cover. And then after that we moved to the Christmas series for year three.

This is called Waiting for the King. And again, it’s got Old Testament tied into New Testament and Birth of Jesus, which I think is so cool. And then we have a long series starting off the New Year for year three. It’s called the I Ams of Jesus. And these are the powerful truths and the things that Jesus proclaimed in the New Testament. And we include Revelation here in this. And then we have stories about Jesus and people who walked with Jesus in our series Walking with Jesus.

We have the year three Easter series, which is called Connected. And it connects the stories from the Old Testament, starting with the burning bush and the Big Story of God’s redemption through the resurrection. And then after that, the next series for year three is about the Holy Spirit. And this is another New Testament series. And then we move to another epistle series. This is called Rooted.

This talks about the things from the New Testament that we can learn to help us become rooted in our identity in Christ. And it concludes with the series Wonderful Worship. And this is a series from the Old and New Testament about worship and how our lives can tell of God’s wonder. So that is a quick glimpse at our three-year scope and sequence and how it points to our four core values for Wonder Ink.

Core Values

Absolutely. And as you’ll notice this, as you probably saw throughout this quick overview, it’s just noticed that the, we have our core values are listed throughout. And so knowing when you’re looking over the scope and sequence document at WonderInk.org, if you’d like to download it there, if you haven’t already done so, check that out. You’ll be able to see what series fall under what core value and how we’re tying it back to that core value.

So we are so grateful that you have chosen to check out Wonder Ink. And we’re glad that you came on this short little video journey with us on our scope and sequence. Blessings to you and we thank you.

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