Kids usually have a box of toys, and their favorite toy is the one they are playing with right now.
When it comes to creating presentations or messages, it’s helpful (and fun) to think of the tools available to us as if they were toys in a toy box.
There may not be one perfect tool to help us craft creative presentations. The best tool is simply the one that fits the kind of presentation we need to make right now.
Yesterday I shared with you PART 1 of some questions that our middle schoolers (Grades 5-8) asked anonymously about love and dating. If you haven’t checked it out yet, you should. Because their questions were awesome. And super interesting.
You may have noticed that many of the questions our students asked yesterday were pretty light-hearted. Silly. Naive. Childish. Cute, even. But I think you’ll see that, in this next batch of questions, the tone shifts a bit.
So let’s get into PART 2 now. Here are our middle schoolers’ questions about “serious” relationships, marriage, and divorce…
If you’ve been working with middle schoolers for longer than 4 seconds, then you already know that some of the most confusing, emotional, exciting, and stressful things middle schoolers deal with are… the issues of love and dating.
In this series, we wanted to make sure we were doing our very best to address our students’ biggest needs and questions. We had some ideas about what we thought they needed to hear about love and dating, of course, but we couldn’t help but wonder…
Are we really being helpful?
Here’s the idea.
When we begin our program, we introduce that day’s Showdown and choose two students that want to battle it out (usually a guy and a girl). We give them each a pumpkin (already hollowed out and seeded) and 15 minutes to prepare.
After 15 minutes, we called them back and watched them carve their pumpkins live in front of our group. We chose the winners by letting the crowd cheer for their favorite.
And of course we needed a cool prize, so Elle carved a pumpkin with our logo in it.
If you’re looking to do your own On-the-Spot Pumpkin-Carving Showdown, here’s what you’ll need for each battle…
There are great talkers… and then there are great talks.
As a director of a student environment, I want our ministry to have both. I want great talks, delivered by great talkers.
You might be a great talker, but that doesn’t mean you always give a great talk.
You might be entertaining.
You might be funny.
Your middle schoolers might have listened.
They might have even applauded as you walked off the stage.
Those things might be good qualifications for a good Vegas show. But they do not mean you did a great ministry “talk.”