19 Aug One Big Story Sparks and Idea or Two…or 20!

Posted at 12:56h in Environment, Once, Storytelling by lisa 2 Comments
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It All Started When 252 Basics Suggested Something

Back in April (and again in May), the 252 Basics blog posted about their plan for the 2013-2014 school year. One post reviewed the scope and cycle and one suggested where to fit One Big Story (Turn it Up-Elementary) into your curriculum plan. You can read those posts here and here.

This suggestion led us to revamp our entire summer plan, as well as, how we would kick off our school year this coming fall. Read all the details about that here, but for now, here’s our bottom line for fall:

  • We are using the last week of August and the five weeks of September (six weeks total) to cover Obedience (from August) and Courage (from September).
  • We’ll use three stories from each life app and add info from the weeks we miss on appropriate weeks.
  • In October, we’ll kick off with the rest of you 252 Basics users as we hit the life app of Honor. 

The Creation of A Hot Mess!

The plan above sounds simple enough-right? WRONG! Figuring out the schedule turned out to be just the beginning of this “madness!” Fitting two Life Apps into a six week period meant we had to edit curriculum accordingly and communicate the changes to our tech and resource teams. That’s always the hardest part of changing curriculum around. Making sure all teams know what is happening so that graphics, parent resources, and signage for bottom lines, etc. throughout our environment line up properly.

That doesn’t even touch what we need to do with decor! We will be creating 3 sets in a matter of 7 weeks! Yikes. That’s a blog post in and of it self, so stay tuned. For now, read below to get an idea of what we brainstormed for this six week period.

Personally, I’m looking forward to October when we’ll be back on track with 252 Basics!

All Over the Map

Our brainstorming sessions ran the gamut this time around, from one idea to another. We got stuck a few times and argued a bit too. 😉 In the end, we had to stop and re-evaluate what we really wanted to achieve. What’s funny is that where we started was very different from where we ended. And, what we ended up deciding to implement has nothing to do with what we originally brainstormed about. Go figure! But that is the beauty of a brainstorming session. It can lead to something unexpected. Something really exciting. Something that could end up being really awesome! I hope that will be the case with what we’ve come up with, but I’m not sharing it with you for that reason.

My hope is that seeing a bit of our crazy/all over the map process will encourage you and your teams. Creativity rarely comes in a neat package that starts with A and ends at Z with no twists or turns in between. Below is a testament to that! I hope you and your team brainstorm a lot. I’d love to hear about what that looks like. Start a conversation in the comment section below!

Set Decor or Teaching Tool & Long Term Plan?

As I thought about how we wanted to kick off our school year/ministry season, I knew I wanted to go after a few things:

  • I wanted to capitalize on the fact that 252 Basics was taking us through the Bible chronologically this year.
  • I wanted to really focus on the “One Big Story-Timeline” especially in those first weeks/month. 
  • I wanted to lay the foundation or create a pattern throughout the first month for how we would present and access the Bible during the Bible narrative all year long.

I originally thought that since we were mashing up two life apps over the course of six weeks and it would be hard to create multiple sets in that time, we could scrap the themes for Obedience (Some Assembly Required) and Courage (Phobia Island) and really play up the idea of stories.

I thought I wanted our decor those first six weeks to set up the One Big Story aspect of things really well and then become something we could weave into our storytelling each month. It would be part of our set but in a smaller way.

  • We considered having the entire stage dedicated to stories…a rocking chair or some cool seating area, bookshelves with tons of children’s books, posters of favorite children’s stories, etc.
  • We thought about having a huge Bible that we would go to each week at the beginning of the story and pull out a block word of sorts, representing the book of the Bible we were looking at. Then we would hang that word on a huge timeline on our stage somewhere.
  • This  oversized Bible and Timeline portions of the set would be the components that stuck with us all year long as a way for the storyteller to begin the Bible narrative each week.

My director and I spent some time “hashing out” what we wanted this to look like. It was an interesting time of brainstorming because while we started out discussing how our decor for the One Big Story-Timeline component would fit into the monthly theme decor, we ended up developing an entire program for how we are going to have our storytellers interact with the Bible and the One Big Story-Timeline all year long, as they introduced the Bible narratives. This did not happen immediately however.

Speed Bumps, or Should I Say Pot Holes!

As we talked through all of the above, we hit our fair share of road blocks:

  • ISSUE #1 – The oversized Bible and Timeline could end up being quite juvenile. While we want kids from Kindergarten thru 5th grade to connect, we know the importance of targeting those 4th & 5th graders-particularly the boys. If they engage, others will join them.
  • ISSUE #2 – If we scraped the monthly themes 252 Basics suggested, we would need to rewrite the entire host portion for all six weeks, since the host’s part is so tied to the monthly theme each week. We did not want to reinvent the wheel, particularly since the themes 252 Basics suggest are so great. 
  • ISSUE #3 – If we ditched the monthly themes from 252 Basics, we would lose all of our graphics for six weeks. NOT HAPPENING!

At this point, we were stuck. We decided to shelve everything and come back to it the next day. Both my director and I would take the evening to talk to people we know are good at this stuff (his wife and my 18 year old  daughter) and reconvene with fresh thoughts the next day.

We did just that and they helped us think through it all and come up with the base for our current plan. Wanna know what it is? You’ll have to read that in my next post! For now, tell us a bit about how your brainstorming sessions look. What helps you when you’re stuck? What are some of your rules for the session? Let’s hear from you!