by Sam Luce

A few thoughts from Sam Luce about the breakout: Improving your First Look Environment, facilitated by Kendra Fleming, at Orange ’10.

About the Presenter – Kendra Fleming is one of my favorite kids pastors.
1. I love Northpoint church
2. I have been blown away by her willingness to help out other kids pastors.
3. Love her blog – I always say it is one of my favorites. I love how her blog is written from in the trenches. It offers practical help that is scalable. You can use it.

Why I picked this. – We just started to use My First Look at our church and I am looking for practical suggestions on how to make our small groups better.

Here are a couple things that stood out to me.
Small group.
–Have consistency.
–Introduce your kids to their small group leaders –
–8-10 small group kids in preschool is a great small group number.

Large group
–Teach one thing at a time.
–You need to repeat repeat – They like knowing the answer –
–Get your story tellers to stick to a script.
–Internalized the content.

Training
–Don’t just tell people what to do tell them why
–When people don’t get here on time – your kids have to wait – always explain things in the context of vision.
–Cast vision for why talk about How.
–Training should be inspirational and practical – don’t give them 15 things to do give them 1 or 2 things.
–Feedback on consistent basis – if it’s random it feels random. –

Superusers
–Make a video of standard motions to songs. You can even use your computers webcam to do this.
–Pick one thing to do when you go home – DO ONE THING once you have one thing down do the next thing.

What is the ONE THING you could do to improve your preschool environment?