How to help your kids focus during the sermon at church

I don’t know about your kids, but mine have a hard time focusing at church.  They focus at Sunday School well enough, but it comes time for the sermon at church, and they’re drawing all over, and having a hard time focusing.  While my church has a great set of sermon notes in general, the application questions, later on, are, for obvious reasons, not geared for kids.

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So, I was happy when my friend Anna Joy over at the Narrow Path* mentioned she had sermon notes for kids. I knew I needed to give them a try.

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Look at the different types of sermon notes for kids

Anna Joy came up with three different age ranges of sermon notes.  There’s:

sermon notes for kids (early elementary) – I’d say this is 1st or 2nd-grade level

sermon notes for kids (upper elementary) – depending on your kids I’d say 3rd or 4th grade

sermon notes for kids (tween edition) – this is the one I printed for my kids

A practical way for your kids to take sermon notes

So, those pictures are all well and good, but why do I like these sermon notes for kids?

I love how these sermon notes have lines just the right size.  I know that seems like a small thing, but it’s important to have the right balance.  It’s always something I notice when looking at notebooking pages.  Are the lines too big or too small, what is the perfect size for second grade is huge for sixth grade. It’s the former public school teacher in me, I guess.

While the sermon notes are useful, I love the questions for after.  They are simple, and any kids can answer them if they read the passage.  But, it’s not so simple that it insults the intelligence of the kids.  It’s actually the same types of questions I ask when I start my Bible study.

Just to make sure the questions don’t become repetitive, there are several different sets of questions for the older kids (and for the younger ones, but I didn’t print them off since my kids were too old for them).

Totally unrelated to the sermon notes for kids, but amusing picture

My church meets in a local YMCA, every week we come in and set it all up.  Well this week a few minutes into the start of church the leaders came by my classroom and said, “There’s a tornado warning, and we might be evacuating into a smaller room because there’s a tornado warning,” and sure enough a few minutes later we were all evacuated into an interior room away from the windows.  I didn’t take a picture of the kids in there, but I did sneak a picture of our pastor preaching the sermon in the hallway of the YMCA during the tornado. It was pretty cool.

Get your own copy of these sermon notes for kids

Anna Joy has all sorts of variations of this, you can order a print copy or a download and print yourself option (I obviously got the download and print option).  So head on over to the Narrow Path store to get your own copy and you can use the code adventures20 for 20% off.