A 15 minute Sunday school lesson built around one coloring page

It is Saturday night and you are teaching in the morning. You have a room of six year olds, roughly twenty minutes of their attention, and no printed curriculum.

Here is a lesson that works, uses one page, and takes fifteen minutes. I will use Who Is Jesus and John 14:6 as the example, but the shape works with any verse page you have.

Before you leave the house

Print one page per child plus three spares. Somebody will tear one, somebody will arrive late, and somebody's younger sibling will end up at the table. Bring more crayons than you think.

Minutes 0 to 2: ask before you tell

Do not open with the verse. Open with a question they can all answer.

If somebody at school asked you who Jesus is, what would you say?

Let three or four of them answer. Do not correct anybody yet. You are finding out what they already think, and you are getting them talking before they are asked to sit still.

Minutes 2 to 4: read it once, slowly

Jesus saith unto him, I am the way, the truth, and the life: no man cometh unto the Father, but by me.

John 14:6

Read it twice. The second time, ask them to hold up a finger each time they hear the word I am. Small physical tasks buy you a surprising amount of focus.

Minutes 4 to 6: one idea, not three

The temptation is to teach the way, the truth and the life all at once. Do not. Pick one and stay there.

The way is the easiest for young children, because a way is a path and children understand paths. Jesus is not giving directions to someone else. He is the road itself.

A useful question: has anybody here ever been lost? You will get a story. Everyone has one. Then: what did you need most when you were lost? Somebody who knew the way.

Minutes 6 to 13: hand out the pages

This is the part that actually does the teaching, and it is the part most lessons rush.

While they color, talk. Do not stand at the front, sit down at the table. Children say more sideways over a crayon than they will facing you.

Two questions worth asking while they work:

• Who is somebody you could tell about this week?
• What is one place you go where it is hard to remember that Jesus is with you?

You are not looking for right answers. You are letting the verse sit in their hands for seven minutes, which is longer than most adults spend with it.

Minutes 13 to 15: send it home

Do not collect the pages. They go home, they go on a fridge, and the verse gets read again by a parent who was not in your room. That is the highest leverage two seconds of the whole lesson.

Ask one closing question and let a couple of them answer out loud: what is one word you remember from today?

Why the coloring is the lesson, not the filler

It is easy to treat a coloring page as the thing that keeps them busy after the real teaching. It is the other way around.

A child who colors a verse spends ten minutes looking at those words. A child who hears it read spends nine seconds. The page is not the activity. The page is the repetition, and repetition is how any of us learned anything we still know.

Reusing the shape

The structure holds for any page: ask a question, read it twice with something to do, teach one idea, color and talk, send it home. Once you have run it once you will not need to plan a Saturday night again.