Question:

I had an awful day teaching Sunday School. My problem was discipline, starting with my son. Of coure, he acts up because I'm the teacher. For example, when it's time to pray he puts his hadns together and lays face down on the ground. So of course the other two boys copy him. Meanwhile, two 3 and almost four year old girls start giggling and holding hads and don't pay attention or engage with the story at all. The littlest girl walks away and twirls around. We can't get them to sing; well some of them will but the others refuse. The same 4 year old girl who acts up and won't sit still to hear the lesson refuses to participate in putting a coin in the united thank offering box and saying thankyou for everything. Whenever we try to explain anything, they ignore us. Any suggestions?

Answer:

I taught a similar age-group at Saint Stepnen's for a while...

It's a pretty rough age-spread. The two-to-three's can't follow the lesson at the same level that the four-to-five's can. At craft time, they can't cut (although they can paste, if it doesn't have to be in a particular place), and yet the four-to-fives are not really old enough to help them. With the small group that you've got, it might work better for you to think of it as a large family rather than a small class -- that's a little more flexible a model that lets you play things by ear and use your instincts.

You can get wandering children involved by starting a project, all by yourself, in the middle of the room, emphasizing your body-language to model how interested you are in the project. I find small children often want to "help" when I'm doing something interesting. Imagine if you were sitting in the middle of the room with a big pile of pennies, jingling them, and saying aloud to yourself "I'm thankful for ... hmmmm ... Hucklberries!" and then loudly dropping in a penny. When a child or two comes to see what you're doing, you can explain it to them, and offer to let them try. It works with colouring, too -- vigourously start colouring a lesson-sheet. Offer to share with them when they show an interest, and then when their all colouring, start telling you lesson-story conversationally while the colouring keeps them in one place.

One of the hardest things for me was, that I always feel like feeding, dressing, and herding children out the door is equivalent to climbing a small mountain. Of all the times when I'm *not* up to charming, engaging and discipling a gaggle of pre-schoolers, that would be it. Extrapolating freely from my own tastes, might it help if a kindly help-offering mom is willing to be at church ten minutes early every Sunday and amuse your children while you have a nice solitary cup of tea?

The copy-cat syndrome is apparently a five-year-old thing: social acceptance by complete conformity. The leaders' manual for Sparks (the younger Brownie group, our version of "Daisies") warns about this. It tells the tale of "the Night of Dead Cats". The leaders in this case were teaching a lesson on pets, when one child volunteered that she had a pet cat that died. One by one all the children volunteered stories about their dead cats, outdoing one another in either the number or the deadness of their defunct kitties. My PTS does this too -- no matter what someone else mentions, he has it too or did it too -- no matter how unlikely. We're working hard with him on distinguishing fact from story, but the "me-too" response seems to be hard-wired.

When it's craft-time, you may want to try having an ultra-simple version of the craft for the littlest children: cut out all their pieces ahead of time, or even assemble the craft and just let them colour it. And if all they want to do is colour, let'em -- and tell stories while they do. They'll still hear the lesson and think about it, even if they look like they're not thinking of anything but colouring.

Good luck -- it may well get easier and easier as you get to know the children.