Though written to parents, Deuteronomy 6:5-9 provides some principles teachers of children’s classes can apply to their teaching.
Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength. These commandments that I give you today are to be upon your hearts. Impress them on your children. Talk about them when you sit at home and when you walk along the road, when you lie down and when you get up. Tie them as symbols on your hands and bind them on your foreheads. Write them on the door frames of your houses and on your gates.
Principles to Guide Intentional Teaching
Reread the above verses with these principles in mind:
1) Intentional teaching needs a worthy goal.
Notice how the commandments are summed up in loving the Lord with their whole being. We must get beyond the dos and don’ts of God’s laws to responding from a relational foundation with the Lord. Jesus likewise identifies loving the Lord with all of who we are as the greatest commandment, making it a very worthy goal.
2) Parents and teachers must live intentionally so as to model this goal of wholehearted love and devotion to the Lord.
Notice how it must begin in our own hearts, for out of the heart everything we do flows (Prov. 4:23).
3) Intentional teaching makes the most of every opportunity to steer students toward the Lord.
Notice how it gets beyond mere formal, oral education. We must seize informal opportunities as well.
Practical Outworking of Intentionality in Children’s Classes
Begin by viewing time with children as an opportunity to disciple them. We aren’t there to babysit them, even in our youngest groups. Nor can it be about simply getting through the lesson.
Guard your own heart so as to be a good model of what it means to love the Lord. That includes attitudes as well as doing the right thing. How we handle interruptions and discipline issues will either underscore or cancel out our words.
Make sure all that’s done in the session has purpose. Children do learn through play, but we need to make sure it ties in to the truths being learned. The same goes with doing crafts and games. None of these activities should be mere time fillers.
Enhance the potential of reaching this goal by using guided conversation before, during, and after class. Bring God into even the ordinary and routine.
(Clicking on the above links will take you to worksheets that can help you become more intentional in these ways.)