The Church Garden: A Place For NCC’s Children To Grow

By Shannon Hicks

For more than a year Newtown Congregational Church has been undergoing major renovations. The sanctuary at 14 West Street has had an addition built onto it that nearly doubles the building’s size. The addition will bring the church building and its offices and classrooms under one room for the first time in five decades; until now the weekly sermons have been presented at the West Street building, while all office business, many group meetings, and Sunday school classes have taken place in the church house at 41-A Main Street. The church house was constructed in 1956.

In addition to the exterior work that has been occurring, some changes are taking place inside the church. NCC’s Sunday school has been renamed The Church Garden, and when classes begin on September 12, an entirely new curriculum will be presented.

 “It was time to do something new with Sunday school,” Carolyn Joseph, a co-chair of NCC’s Christian Education Committee, said last week. “Sunday school hasn’t changed since I was in school. We wanted to find something where children would retain more from their lessons.”

What the church has decided to go with is a program called Workshop Rotation Model, or WoRM. The idea is new to Newtown’s congregational church, but it has been in use elsewhere in the country for almost 15 years. The curriculum, or “design philosophy” as its developers prefer to call it, was not developed in one day but was pulled together when Sunday school educators during the late 1980s began seeing a need to better educate children.

Members of NCC’s Christian Education Committee visited a church in Glastonbury earlier this year to see rotation workshops in action.

“Since visiting that church we have been so excited,” Ester Nichols reported to Newtown Congregational Church members before their worship service on June 13.

The public is invited to join Newtown Congregational Church members on Saturday, August 28, for an open house. From 9 am until noon, members of NCC’s Christian Education Committee and students will be offering demonstrations and information about Workshop Rotation Models. Registration will also be accepted at that time.

Ms Joseph and Tina Fiorello, the second Christian Education Committee co-chair at NCC, have been offering short presentations during Sunday services all summer.

“We’ve received extremely positive response from the congregation in regard to the changes that will be taking place,” Ms Fiorello said.

The name Workshop Rotation Model was coined by Melissa Hansche and Neil MacQueen in June 1990. Ms Hansche was at the time the director of Christian education at Presbyterian Church of Barrington, one of the churches in the Chicago Presbytery where the model got its start. Mr MacQueen is a Presbyterian minister in Columbus, Ohio, and the founder of Sunday School Software Ministries. It was while he was serving as the associate minister at Presbyterian Church of Barrington that he and others in the Chicago area developed WoRM.

In an essay he wrote for the WoRM website (www.rotation.org) in June 1998, Mr MacQueen admitted he never really liked the name Workshop Rotation Model, but it nevertheless caught on and “it seemed to be the most descriptive when talking about it with other educators.”

WoRM offers students the opportunity to be guided through the school year by a Shepherd, while volunteer church members can be a teacher for a little as four weeks.

Perhaps WoRM’s biggest concept is that children will learn through repetition. The same story is taught during the four or five weeks of a rotation, with age-appropriate topics (because the students will still be divided into different grade levels).

Children learn major stories and concepts from the Bible, and each week of the story’s rotation offers a different presentation. Classes have been taught through kid-friendly multimedia including art workshops, drama, music, games, puppets, storytelling, computers… basically any way that teachers can come up with to teach.

Students rotate with their class into a different workshop each week during a rotation period. For a rotation focused on The Birth of Jesus, for instance, students can spend their first week in a theater workshop, their second in a games/music workshop, their third in an art workshop, their fourth in a computer workshop, and their fifth in a drama workshop. A new rotation will then begin, focusing on a new topic.

Teachers offer their workshops in their area of expertise (art, drama, music, etc), teaching the same workshop to different classes for the four or five weeks of their rotation. Because many of the lessons from the Bible have already been approached by teachers who follow the WoRM curriculum, many lesson plans are already available online, which makes lesson plans that much easier.

 

The Shepherd

While the teachers may change after each rotation period during the course of the school year, each class does have one stable figure that stays with it during the year: a Shepherd.

Ester Nichols has been named NCC’s Shepherd Leader.

“Shepherds will give children stability and continuity each week,” she explained to church members in June. “Shepherds will be responsible for taking role call. They will build relationships with children through discussion and prayer during free time.”

In looking to recruit people to become shepherds, Mrs Nichols urged, “As a shepherd, you will be learning with the children, not teaching, and then discussing lessons with them. This commitment will allow the chance to meet more children and take part in their church day.”

The Christian Education Committee has been looking for teachers. A sign-up sheet has been posted in the narthex each Sunday before worship, and again during the postworship coffee hour. Carolyn Joseph understands how tough it can be to get people to commit to being teachers for a full school year, but has been pleasantly surprised at the response she is seeing from the congregation.

“I taught for two years and it’s a huge time commitment,” she said last week. “For The Church Garden, though, teacher commitment is going better than I expected.”

“You teach to your strength,” Mrs Fiorello said, “so you don’t have to wear all the hats for a full year. This program is much more exciting for the teachers as well as the students.”

“There will be so much more interaction,” Mrs Joseph stressed. “More people are coming out to volunteer.”

That’s what 9-year-old Alex DeWolfe is looking forward to when school starts in the fall. Alex has been attending — and enjoying — Sunday school since she was in pre-K classes. Now that she’s heading into fourth grade, she’s more excited than ever.

“I think Sunday school will be very interesting this year,” Alex said this week. “I’ve heard that parents can see more of what their children are learning about, and that they can help their kids learn.

“I love all the teachers that are there. I can’t wait to start with the new ones,” she continued.

Finally, for Newtown, WoRM will bring the congregation together. Not only will the Sunday school and worship services be held under the same roof, but the Christian education co-chairs say they plan to present more family activities.

“We’re definitely looking into more family function-type activities,” said Mrs Fiorello. “We want families to get to know each other better.

“Having everyone participate in activities, we’ll get to know entire families, not just the kids,” she added. “It’s going to be such a difference now with everyone all together. We want everyone — children and adults — to know each other.

“And when we say family, we mean spiritual family, not just biological families,” she pointed out.

These women, and all members of the Christian education committee, are hoping that The Church Garden’s adoption of Rotating Workshop Model will not only help children keep the stories of the Bible in their heads and hearts forever, it will help build strong groundwork for later years in life.

“The future of our church depends on our children,” said Mrs Joseph. “This program will help build strong spiritual foundations that children will be less likely to stray from.”