How to Get the Most Out of Activity Pages

Using the Activity Pages block in DIG IN Children’s Church? Awesome! Here are some tips to make sure you get the most purpose out of these pages—rather than using them as busywork.

Topic	Do…	Don’t…	Why?
Using the questions provided	Introduce the puzzle pages and debrief them using the content provided in the lesson.	Just hand out the puzzles and let kids do them without structure.	On their own, puzzles don’t help kids learn or promote discovery. We’ve re-invented the puzzles to have a purpose—and that purpose shines through when kids discuss what they experienced and make discoveries.
Choosing an activity page	Let kids choose which activity page they think best fits them. While the activity page is geared for older kids, generally kids who can read and have better fine motor skills and logical/spatial reasoning, it’s best to let kids self-select what they feel comfortable with.	Assume that younger kids can’t do the puzzle or that older kids can.	Even older kids may struggle with reading, especially when it comes to word puzzles. You can avoid embarrassing kids by letting them choose whether to do the activity page or the coloring page.
Sending home coloring pages	Create a keepsake! Collect the coloring sheets for regular attendees and assemble them into binders. At the end of the program, kids can take home a “Bible” with the stories they learned and their artwork.	Send pages home weekly to be lost on the floor of the car.	Kids and parents will have a keepsake that will help them remember the lessons learned in your ministry.
Fitting the activity pages into your lesson	Plan on a structured 10 minutes for activity pages.	Use the activity pages as a time filler as kids arrive or are waiting to be picked up.	Using the puzzles with no clear beginning or end will make it difficult to debrief and connect the puzzles to discovery.
Providing answers	Use the answer key provided (when applicable) to help kids know the solution if they are stuck.	Publicly call kids out to give answers they may not know, or make it obvious that one child struggled to solve a puzzle.	The activity pages are meant to be an enjoyable time for kids—not feel like a school assignment they are graded and judged on.
Allowing “group” work	Let kids work with a friend when that is helpful to them.	Be too rigid about kids solving puzzles on their own.	As mentioned above, puzzles should be an enjoyable time and not feel like a school assignment.
Co-Leading	Have an adult or teen helper lead one activity page while you lead the other. Designate one part of the room for kids who choose the activity page, and another part for kids who choose the coloring page.	Try to lead everyone from the front at the same time.	This allows you to smoothly lead two different experiences at once.

What’s different about DIG IN’s puzzles?

Group has historically taken a hard line against puzzles as busy work. In the book Why Nobody Learns Much of Anything at Church: And How to Fix It, Group’s owners Thom and Joani Schultz give a clear warning: “Puzzles, scrambles, fill-in-the-blanks, and encoded messages do not promote thinking. They confuse and consternate. Through this type of meaningless busywork, our students will not grow closer to God.”

So you may be surprised to see that our new DIG IN Children’s Church curriculum includes an Activity Pages option that’s full of puzzles and coloring sheets! Look a little more closely, though, and you’ll see the full block name: Activity Pages With a Purpose.

Puzzles can be used poorly. But they don’t have to be! Read on to find out how we’ve infused our puzzles with purpose and intentionality to help kids make discoveries rather than regurgitate facts.

Purposeful puzzles are NOT just “r-bbits…”

In Why Nobody Learns Much of Anything at Church, the Schultzes warn against teachers helping kids learn with “nonsensical fill-in-the-blank drills, word scrambles, and missing letter puzzles.” According to the book, educator Frank Smith coined a term for these exercises: “r-bbits.”

R-bbits are silly fill-in puzzles that in no way reflect how kids learn to speak or read, and yet are intended to teach just that. And they can also make their way into children’s ministry. For example, one use of a puzzle might be to ask kids to fill in blanks to complete a verse. (Or for adults, we might provide sermon notes with blanks to fill in!)

We know churches love to use puzzles, but we also know that most of the Bible puzzles out there are full of r-bbits. They don’t help kids learn, and they don’t help kids think. So we created something different. The puzzles you’ll find in DIG IN Children’s Church are not just r-bbits.

…Instead, our puzzles reinforce the lesson by becoming a hands-on object lesson.

Since 1992 when Hands-On Bible Curriculum first came out, Group has used gizmos to create object lessons that help kids make discoveries. It’s our “Teach as Jesus Taught” model. Jesus used everyday objects around him to help teach faith lessons and provoke thinking. In his day, those items included mustard seeds, sheep, fish, and coins.

For kids today, it might include bouncy balls, toys, and puzzles. We avoid creating r-bbits by turning our puzzles into object lessons—just like we would with a gizmo. For example, in a lesson that teaches “God is real” and covers the story of Elijah and the prophets of Baal (1 Kings 18), we have a word search with 12 words on the list. But we let kids know upfront, only eight of those words are really in the puzzle. They’ll have to look carefully to identify what’s real and what’s fake on the word list.

Now, rather than a word search that’s simply a rote review of words from the Bible story, we’ve evoked emotion as kids experience looking for something that’s not really there. Just like the prophets of Baal prayed to a god that wasn’t really there.

In a lesson on Aquila and Priscilla (Acts 18:1-28), kids learn the point “God uses our talents.” In this lesson’s activity page, kids have three puzzle options that use different types of talents—observation, language, and math. Kids get to choose which puzzle they’d like to do based on their talents—and then help a friend who completed a different one. Rather than merely spotting the difference between two images, they’re using their talent to help someone.

Purposeful puzzles are NOT time fillers…

We’ve all been there. The sermon runs long, and we’ve finished our lesson. It can be nice to fill the extra time with some Bible-themed coloring pages and puzzles that may or may not relate to the day’s Bible story.

But at Group, we don’t believe in “filling time.” Our time with kids is so short, so extra time from a long sermon is an opportunity—not something we have to “fill!” DIG IN Children’s Church provides an “Overtime” activity that’s no prep, no supplies, and full of discovery to use that extra time wisely.

But if you’re going to use puzzles, they shouldn’t be time fillers. They should be an intentional part of the lesson that helps kids make more discoveries.

…Instead, we use time strategically to include discovery-infused discussion.

In their book, Thom and Joani Schultz suggest, “Our people don’t need to be told what to think. But they desperately need to learn how to think in a Christian context.”

And the way to do that is through strategic, intentional questions. So often, Bible lessons for kids are full of “right answer questions.” Questions like “Who built the ark?” don’t help kids make discoveries.

In the book Endangered Minds by Jane Healy, Healy writes, “Studies demonstrate that educating teachers in specific questioning techniques can improve their students’ reading comprehension, among many other skills, by moving their thinking up from literal repetition of facts into the realms of comprehension, application, and inferential reasoning.”

In other words, discovery-based questions help kids learn to think about faith! That’s why a huge part of the puzzles in DIG IN is the discussion that follows it. The discussion takes intentional time, but it adds so much discovery and meaning to what might otherwise be an r-bbit.

Using the example above of the word search with extra words on the list, the real meaning comes when kids debrief their experience. We follow up that puzzle with these questions:

• Which words did you look for that weren’t really there?
• What are some things that don’t have any real power but people treat like they do?

After evoking emotion through the puzzle itself, we’ve helped kids share about that experience. We’ve also helped them analyze how that relates to things in their lives.

Similarly, we help kids unpack the choose-your-own puzzle by asking about their talents:

• Why did you pick the puzzle you picked?
• How could God use talents like being good with words, math, or pictures?

It’s critical that puzzles are followed up with the purposeful debriefing. That’s where kids personalize, analyze, and discover.