4 Ways to Teach Bible Skills in a Socially Distanced World

August 4, 2020

Webinar Transcript

- We are just super excited that you've joined us tonight, we're just ecstatic with the numbers that have been interested in the four ways to the Bible Drill or Bible Skills in their churches in a socially distance world that we're in. These past few months have just been crazy for all of us. I think when it first began in March, we had no idea that we'd be sitting where we are tonight with school systems daily making changes about what students and children were gonna do as they go back into the classroom. But a few months ago, Maria and Deborah and I were talking and we realized that while churches may meet back together in person on Sunday mornings for worship, and they may even have Sunday school, that it was gonna be quite a while before we were worshiping and doing activities and programming on Wednesday nights and Sunday nights. So back in May, we began developing this resource for you to provide four different ways that you can teach Bible Drill. Or if you just want to teach Bible Skills, if your church doesn't participate in Bible Drill, you can use this resource very well in your churches to enable families to get into God's word together. But we did wanna provide something that all of you could use for that. And so, like we've said, this is a joint effort. It's between the States of Alabama, Georgia and North Carolina. And joining us tonight from Georgia is Maria Brannen. And she works with Georgia Bible Drill and speaker's tournament. She's the executive director of it. And Deborah Robson is the Bible Drill consultant for the Baptist state convention of North Carolina. And then also joining us tonight is David Jennings. And he is the children's pastor at First Baptist Tuscaloosa. And he helped write the at home portion of our resource tonight. He has used that in his church this summer in a different way. And so later on tonight, he's gonna share how that's worked in his church. So we're gonna have firsthand knowledge of how part of the resource works already. So Maria is gonna start us off with prayer and just give us a brief description of the resource. And then we're gonna break it down into the different four ways that we hope that you can use.

- Let's go ahead and open with a word of prayer. Father we just thank you for this time where we can be together and Father, I just thank you for all these leaders Father who have a passion for kids knowing you and for kids having your word in their hearts. And I just pray a special blessing on their ministries. As there mentoring and discipling kids in their churches Father and just give them wisdom as they reach out to the drillers and the kids in their kids' ministry in general and minister to them Father and those families during this time, we ask these things in your name, amen. As Belinda mentioned, we first began to have our conversation back in May when it became very evident, of course, that all of us were having to cancel our in-person regional drills, our in-person state drills for our children, for our youth and high schoolers. And it may be called a little bit different depending on your state, that's what we refer to them as in Georgia. But we, I think when the pandemic started, we all thought that it would just be a few weeks as we sheltered in place. And then we'd be able to resume our kids ministries and our church ministries and do life as we know it as normal, but as it became longer and longer, we realized that we needed to seek new and creative ways on how to do Bible Drill, how to teach kids and our kids' ministry, Bible skills and stay connected with them. So we began to brainstorm, as Belinda mentioned about what this really meant doing kids ministry, doing Bible Drill in the midst of a pandemic. And so as we began to brainstorm four areas emerged of how we could do Bible Drill. And you probably saw that referenced in the webinar's description, kind of as an ABC and D that we can do Bible Drill or teach our kids Bible skills at home, that we can be online connecting with the kids in our ministry, see that we can take a traditional approach, if the numbers are good and our churches being able to meet on campus, we can do Bible Drill or teach Bible skills at church. And then D our last one is discover the outdoors. This is an option that many of our churches and ministries have taken up is to be very creative in how they do some of the different activities outdoors. So tonight we're gonna share some of these ideas as Belinda shared. This would really was a joint effort between our three state since we contributed different ideas to help leaders and really to put a resource in the hands of leaders, to be able to reach out, to continue to disciple the kids in their ministry. So we're gonna be walking through these different ones again, and you'll hear more about it, but this resource it's an ebook that shares. It will be on each of our conventions websites, so in our case, on our Georgia Baptist Bible Drill and speakers inc website. And you'll be able to download that you see on your screen there, the four ways to do Bible Drill in a social distance world. So that's an ebook that you'll be able to download tomorrow off one of our respective websites. And Belinda's gonna begin by sharing the at home portion of how to do Bible Drill and teach Bible Skills.

- You know, for years in our churches, we have been talking about how we really want parents to be the primary spiritual disciplers of their children in the home. We want them to have that Deuteronomy six example, and you know, if there's been one good thing, I think that I've seen out of the pandemic, how I have seen that happening in homes with families. I've seen them worshiping together at home, on social media seeing them doing vacation Bible school together. And now I'm really looking forward to seeing them getting into God's word together. And that's what this at home portion of our four ways is going to do. And in the at-hand portion, we have provided 25 Bible Drill activities and a devotion that goes along with each Bible verse. Now, these Bible verses go along with our Bible Drill cycle, the red cycle that we will be doing this year for 2020, 2021. So it's those 25 verses that are on the verse cards. For those of you who are familiar with Bible Drill, it's also 25 of the 75 verses that Lifeway recommends that children learn as foundational verses for their lives. So it will get them into verses that are familiar probably to all of us, the verses that we know we want them to carry with them throughout their lives. So each one of those verses will have an activity and they will have a devotion that go along with it. Then also we'll be providing a 10 key passage activities and 10 key passage devotions. So those are just great Bible stories that families can read together and a little activity they can do, and then dig deeper into God's word, to really understand what that story is teaching them and how to follow Jesus through that story. So there'll be 35 different activities, 25 bursts activities and devotions, and 10 key passage activities and devotion and the at home piece. The at home piece is not included in the ebook. It will be a separate piece and it is a fantastic resource. David Jennings helped us with it. And also the Bible Drill promoters in Alabama, write many of the devotions several years ago. So those are things that he incorporated in it. So Renee page, Cindy Thomas and Steve Stevens all had a part in that devotion writing. So it's really a collaborative effort. I thought it was really neat how something we developed six years ago is something that we're gonna be able to use now. And it's going to be very beneficial for us during these pandemic days., The at home resource is something that you can really use in a variety of ways, you can send it out each week by email, you can send them whole document out to parents and allow them to have it for the whole school year if you would like to do that, or it may be that you supplement with in your Bible Drill class each week, if you have Bible Drill, or if you have childhood discipleship, it could be something that you use weekly with that. There is a supply list that goes along with it. Each of the activities has supplies, most of them do that you can provide for the families and you can provide all those all at one time, you could hand out the whole year's worth 35 activities and devotions and instructions, or you might wanna do that monthly I think monthly might be a really great idea. It would enable you to touch base with the families in your church and the children in your church. Every month you could do a porch drop off, you could have them drop by the church and pick it up certain time and have something fun going on at the church, just a way to physically connect with them. We know during this time parents are overwhelmed. They are dealing with school. A lot of them are working and trying to be school teachers and work in their business and manage their children 24 seven. So I think any sort of resource and something that they can use and fun to do, they would really, really be appreciative of it. I know I've seen that done in very many cases with vacation Bible school and different things over the summer. And I think this would be a really good way for you to connect with them monthly. You could also provide it weekly. If you're having worship services at your church every week, you could have a Ziploc bag with that week's activity and the supplies for that activity that people pick up, or you hand to them as they are leaving church on Sunday mornings. So a reminder to say, hey, let's get in God's word after we leave here this week and let's do something fun together as a family. So I really think it's going to be a resource that can be used in a variety of different ways. And just like, we all know we're all in different SaaS churches. We're all in different areas of our state. Some of us are in Metro areas. Some of us are in rural areas and there's just different needs and all of those different areas. And so you need to tailor it and make it work for your church. And that's the case with the whole four ways document. It's something that you probably won't just do one way. You'll probably do two or three, or maybe even four ways as you're trying to get Bible skills and Bible Drill into the children of your church. Most of our activities have one or two options. A lot of them have one option that may be something you need to purchase but we also have provided some things, that may be less expensive and that parents can just pull from their home to do the activity. So we tried to make a variety of different things. So you could pick and choose what would work best in your situation. But David developed this resource this summer at the very beginning of the summer for his church and provided it as a summer resource with our last year cycle versus the green cycle. And he and I were talking it way back, I guess, in April or May and got connected. And when he told me what he had done, I said, man, that's a great idea. We need to use it for what we're talking about with the four way. So that's how David got involved. So I'm gonna pass it off to him now. And let you just hear how the resources worked for him this summer at first Baptist Tuscaloosa.

- Yes, thank you so much, Ms Belinda we tested out with the green cycle, like you said,` and this was a lot of fun. We believe that we can equip parents to teach Bible skills and Bible Drills. And so that's what we kind of want to do with this. We also went to help our parents have something tangible. Our kids to have something tangible because we know that when kids and families do something, they tend to remember it better than just audio, just talk. And so we develop this a little thing with a lot that was already pre-made with some of those devotions, but what we did, we added a devotion time, to go deeper. if the families wanted to go deeper, but an activity time, that usually would end up with something that the families could key in to remind them of the verse. What we did was we got all the materials, all the things that we had, we ordered it and we bagged them up and we filled up a huge bag full of goodies, really packed it up full of stuff. But we had two things in there. We had all the 25 verses worth of activities. Then we had another bag that says use any time when the kids got that out. Of course, they were excited to miX with everything but we said wait, wait, wait, wait until you get to that week, but take the use anytime bag. And it had all sorts of fun stuff, like little pins that pull out the Bible books on it, and it has candy. And it had some up a fortune cookies that when you open it up, had scripture and saw things that didn't really connect to any particular scripture, but was fun to use at any point. So they had a whole summer's worth of fun and the bag. And we did 10 key passages and the 10 Bible sections over the 10 weeks. So we would check in with our families every week, we did it online with the Zoom. We met with the families and said, hey, how's your going? Are you studying? But they did all the Bible verses as a family on their own time. We encouraged them to do two a week, but we said, if you're a younger family go slower, we really want you to understand the verses first, this isn't trying to zoom through it and get it all memorized, we want your family surely dig in together. Some of the older kids were able to do two or three verses a week, and they were able to go through all 25 during the summer. How do we promote this? Well, when we had the bags ready to promote it, we said, hey, we'll get you a bag. You can come over here and get it, or we'll deliver it to you. We just need you to sign up. And we had our pastor and our associate pastor. They got to give quotes about how Bible Drill meant a lot to them. So our pastor got on saying how Bible Drill was foundational for his life. And we took his picture and took that quote and posted it all over Facebook. We had one of our pastors talk about how his kids grew up through Bible Drill and how he's seen it affect their lives. And so that was a bonus having actual are our pastor crew, share with them a little bit about how they want our family speaking to the Bible Drill. After the first couple of weeks, we have parents send in videos of the kids learning the Bible verses at home. And we actually use that on a Sunday, as we did some live streaming, we showed the video of the kids saying those verses that they had been learning it was a great time, a big twist to what we did since we're doing family Bible Drills is we did kids versus adults. So during this time we challenged the parents and kids, kids, you gotta learn more Bible verses in your parents and parents don't let them do that. You guys said, and of course we always let the kids win whenever we do something like that. But they had a great time when it became family style, they all dig in a little deeper, some extra things that we did in addition to the big bag and the devotional booklet, we had special weeks. So one week instead of meeting and recapping what we were learning, the verses, we had a ice cream truck. It was really just me in the back of my associate's truck. We delivered ice cream to families and they didn't have to pay anything, but a Bible verse, they had to say what verse they were learning. And that was a lot of fun. We had a spa week where the kids were sent a special puzzles that involved the Bible books. And once they figured that puzzle out, it gave them a word. They turned it in, they got some spa gear and they got some glasses that they could see forward and backwards. And we talked about how we're reading our Bible. We can look forward to the new Testament and see it, but we got to keep our eyes in the old Testament to see how it points to Jesus. And that was a lot of fun too. But I think a huge thing we did is we just texted the families, encourage them, hey, this week you could be on these verses. Remember to use that kit that we gave you. And we gave him quotes like from a Tozer about takes a whole Bible to make a whole Christian, just encourage them weekly. So yeah, we have a new a book devotionals for you this time it's 35, 25 versus 10 key passages. And it's a lot of fun and like Ms Belinda was saying a lot of the options have free options, things that you can do with just household items. So whichever way you use that, I hope it encourages families to dig into God's words together and have a lot of fun while they're doing that. I'll be glad to answer any questions about it later, but I think we need to talk about how we can share Bible Drills and Bible skills online. And so I'm gonna toss it to miss a Maria, miss Maria, do you have something to say about how we can help families with Bible Drills and skills doing online activities?

- Sure, thank you, David. Those were some great ideas. I loved hearing about your experience with your church this summer. We appreciate so much you helping write that resource for us, but as we discussed different ways to do Bible Drill being online of course was one of the ways that we discussed that we would do Bible Drill with the kids in our kids' ministry because our churches were meeting virtually of course, much of April, some of our churches, even longer April and May and maybe into part of the summer had been made meeting only virtually. So that was the way we were being able to connect with our kids in so many different ways. And there's multiple ways that we can be online, incorporate technology into doing Bible Drill, connecting with our kids, encouraging them to memorize scripture. Zoom has become something that ha was very popular with our Sunday school classes, our kids ministries and our churches. But as I like to say, sometimes we've developed this love, hate relationship with Zoom, and we love Zoom for the awesome opportunities that it has provided for us to connect. But sometimes some of our families have become tired of being on Zoom, especially if the calls have been too long. If they're Zooming with during the school year, doing virtual school, don't know about your school. Some of our schools in Georgia and our counties have announced that they're doing all virtual school to begin with, there's not an option to do in person school. So just kind of keep that in mind for the families in your churches community, but want to talk about Zoom to begin with and then share some other great ideas of how you can connect online. As I mentioned, Zoom has become a popular resource. I'm sure many of you have used it, but if you'll bear with me just a moment, want to go over a few basics. 'Cause I don't wanna assume that everyone has used Zoom before either for family calls our for a Sunday school class. So Zoom is you can go to the zoom website and we have the link in the ebook and it is Zoom.us. Or you can just Google Zoom and you'll can go to that website, create a free account for Zoom. There is a free and a paid option if you choose the free option and you can use that resource for 40 minutes at a time, or your church and may have purchased a subscription to Zoom for a cost that you could use also honestly, with attention spans of kids. I think the free version is, is great. We may start to lose him if we try to go for an hour, hour and a half so that free option is great for that, that 40 minutes. And Zoom allows you to invite or send out an invitation, an email to those who you want to participate in the Zoom call. If you want to think about it as your online class for Bible Drill. And so you can just send out that email, they make it very easy to send it out and then they can click the link. So as we're talking about connecting with our kids, we're talking probably primarily fourth grader, fifth and sixth graders that we're talking about connecting with for children's Bible Drill and want to share just a few quick tips that we mentioned that you probably already know, but we'd just like to mention in the state we're used to, of course, in our kids' ministry classrooms, always having two adults, at least two adults in the classroom. Well, since we're dealing with minors over the internet in a Zoom classroom, you need to observe the same standards. You need to make sure that you've got two workers on that Zoom call is just great for that safety security measure, but also great to be able to monitor questions that kids have and to swap off where it's not just one adult that's leading the class or the Zoom call, keep your time short. We mentioned kind of that 40 minutes, that that is in my opinion, plenty of time for us to do a Bible Drill class with our kids on Zoom. I even recommend sometimes you might just wanna make yours 15 or 20 minutes and just because of their attention spans and depending on what you're doing that week for Bible Drill. And then of course we're gonna offer some other options, but make sure that Zoom is not your only way that you're connecting. I love how David shared all the different ways that they connected with their families over the summer with Bible Drills. So be thinking through all these different options and not just choosing one, because there's lots of great options that you can switch up, but now I want to change gears and I want you, we're going to be interactive. 'Cause in kids, ministry people we like to be very hands on for a lot of our activities. So I want you to grab a sheet of paper, a piece of cardstock scratch. Sheet of paper that that may be in your house. If you need to take a second run and go get one today that and grab a pen, crayons, color pencils, whatever may be around you. And I want to demonstrate one of our online Zoom games that, so in our resource, we've got multiple Zoom games that you can do with your Bible Drillers. The first one is draw a verse. And so it's exactly like it sounds so encourage your kids or students it's probably hard with my color pencils to see my picture, but I chose the Bible verse Job 37:14, one of our Bible Drill versus we're learning this year, our church and does Bible Drill memorizes in the ESV. And so I wrote the verse on the picture. It says, "listen to this Job stop and consider God's wonders". And then I just drew in my I'm not an artist but I drew different parts of God's creation, some flowers, grass, trees, the clouds, and so forth. So, and encouraged the kids to do that. So you can set a time, have the kids run and get those resources and art supplies, or if you wanted to give them even heads up before the Zoom call to make sure that they have those available and to encourage your kids, give them a Bible verse and encourage them to illustrate that Bible verse and then to share all their pictures on Zoom. A variation of this is if you want to be creative and especially for your preteens, you see that I just pulled a picture off my phone is actually what I did today. And when I think of the wondrous works of God, I think about God's creation. So I went looking for one of my outdoor pictures that I've made. This was from a mission trip in Hawaii and had a lot of special memories. And so I just was when I'm at the beach, I'm always in all of God's creation of the ocean. So that's something that you could do, especially if you had kids and parents online is encouraged them to go find a picture on their phone and then type in the text of the Bible verse and share that. So that's just kind of a variation of the draw a verse that you could do on the Zoom call with that. The second game that I want to share with you and David is gonna share kind of some screenshots because we didn't really with the number of attendees on the Zoom call are not able to go online and play this game. But some of you may be familiar with Kahoot. Again, Kahoot is a free way for you to go online, create a user account. And through the screen share feature of Zoom and asking the parents to be online on that Zoom call and download the zoom app on their phone. You can play an interactive game online. You'll see my first screen shot that I did right there. I created a Zoom game and we actually give you a link to a Zoom game to just kind of get you started that I created we're in the ebook. And so you can click on that link and play it for the first week, if you want to based on red cycle, key passages and some books in the Bible with your kids, but you can choose to do it for the virtual classroom, which is what you choose to do with your kids. But you can also assign it for them to have self paced learning on their individual phone. And so that's kind of a new feature there. So you choose that after you've created your game on Kahoot. And then we'll go to slide two here for the picture, Kahoot let you choose, whether to play individually or do team play. So you see that up right now, player versus player or the team versus team, the team versus team is great if you're in person, you can do it, hook it up to monitoring in your classroom, perhaps, but I recommend the player versus player to be able to do that. So you choose that as a teacher, then with our slot three, it actually generates a pin code. So you're sharing this on your screen. They're seeing it just like you are during the Zoom call. And they will log in on their personal device, their parents, iPhone, or Android, their smartphone iPad to be able to play the game. So they would just type in, and it's a unit code every single time. So this code is not good for game that was just one earlier today to give you an idea that I generated for it to show. So they log in and that's how they connect with you. All right, slide four. This just gives you an idea right there. So what is the correct response for the book before and after Hebrews? So it gives the kids four options to choose. You've created the answers, generated it. So you can see that I may, of course put different books of the Bible just to see if they knew what was the book before the book and the book after kind of our Bible juror response that they would actually give in the drill. And then our last slide to show right here, this is a display of the actual smartphone. So they match it up with those answers in that shape and color that you just saw. And they actually hit that on their phone and it will register. And it will give immediate feedback after those questions to say, who answered it first? Who got it, right? It kind of generates points. And then at the end it shows how they did, but it also has a neat new feature that if they miss some of those answers, like they didn't know all those key passages or didn't know books of the Bible that you assigned in that they can do individual study and review where they can keep reviewing that until they give those correct answers. So those are just two of the examples of some of the online games that we are sharing with you through this ebook resource. In addition to Zoom, as I mentioned, we have several Zoom games in this resource. There are some other ways that you can encourage your kids to be online, to learn the Bible Drill versus. In Georgia, if you go to Georgia has produced a Bible Drill app. Many of you have used or familiar with you can go to the iTunes store, download it. It's preloaded with all the children's youth and high school versus, and you can choose CSB, ESV or King James to study those verses. And it's a great way to review those Bible Drill versus so that's one option. Some of you may be familiar with members.com again, a free website. You can create your own account and it's electronic flashcards, and we'll actually let you work together as a team. So that's another great resource. Some of our kids and students are using Quizzlet with school. You can again put your Bible Drill versus in Quizzlet. That's a great way for them to review online or through the Quizzlet app. And you can challenge the drillers to practice with that. There's virtual bingo games, online memory games. There are so many great ideas. So I really want to challenge you to use some of these online games in your Zoom calls and to connect with your kids virtually doing Bible Drill. And now at this time, I wanna turn it back over to Belinda. And she's gonna talk about doing Bible Drill at church in the midst of a pandemic.

- I don't know how many of you are going to be able to meet back in person to do family or childhood discipleship or Bible Drill. But if you are, we want to just remind you of a couple of things. We want you to make sure that you go along with a CDC guideline and follow those. And what's going on in your local area and community. What your church is asking you to do the guidelines they're giving you and your state as well. We know there's all the masks I want to wear one no, I don't want to wear one controversy right now, but we've provided a real fun video linked to a video in the ebook from Jeff land, who is at a church in Houston, Texas. And he does a little takeoff on Mr. Rogers and talks about wearing mask. So that would be a fun thing to show your children or the families in your church are really good resource to kind of bridge that controversy a little bit. But we do wanna remind you too, that if you're meeting in your classroom, do you wanna take into consideration how large they are, how you can meet socially distance in the classroom. You may have to meet in a different room than you met in last year or in the fellowship hall or in a large area of your church. And as many preschool and children's ministers are talking these days, I'm hearing over and over again, clean, clean, clean, clean like you're a preschool teacher. They've always cleaned well in the preschool area. And sometimes we haven't done so well in the children's area, but we really, really want to make sure that we're cleaning our classrooms, having sanitizer available in after every class, make sure it's cleaned and set back up for another group to come in and meet. If you're doing Bible Drill in your churches, we would like to suggest that maybe you purchased Bibles for each individual child that's participating this year and have a cubby or a tub that they can put their Bible in and keep it there every week. You might even want to provide two Bibles, one for them to have at home. And one for them to have at the church, when they come you ask parents to purchase one and the church purchased one for them. I'm just whatever works for your church, but we know they don't need to be sharing Bibles. So if you could provide a little tub or a bucket or something like that in the classroom, and then put their Bible in any kind of supplies, they might would need pencils, pens, markers, scissors, glue in a Ziploc bag. And then that way they're always using their supplies and we'll keep them in there. You may wanna consider as you're teaching, doing more individual activities. I know a lot of times we love to play group games, that we're passing balls. We're doing things that wouldn't be good in a socially distance environment. So it may be a time where they sit and make things with posted notes, with craft sticks, with all different kinds of supplies like that. Something that could put us up a block bag and keeping their tab at church, or they may want to take it home. And it could be something that they used for review to learn that verse. But we wanna also, just try to think ways that we can do less touching. We're all huggy people in children's ministry, but we wanna step back and do that this this time. So just think about those guidelines that are presented at your church and really adhere to those. And also each of our state conventions have some reopening guidelines. You can find those on our website at the State Board Missions of Alabama alsbom.org or our kids link website. We have a lot of good suggestions and things that you need to think through as you are opening back up, if you are going back into the church facility and we do hope at least by after the first of the year, that that will be possible. We're all praying that we can meet together and that there will be some form of that before too long. So now Deborah is gonna tell us about how we can get outside and do some Bible Drill activities out there.

- Thank you Belinda, those are great tips. And what better place to do Bible Drill than outside? What better place to social distance from other people than outside? I never would have dreamed of doing Bible Drill outside until we started working on this project. But you can do Bible Drill in your church parking lot at a field at your church, at the Bible drill leader's house or even a driller's house. Tonight, we happened to be in my backyard and we're gonna play a couple of games tonight, just to show you how fun Bible Drill can be during social distance outside. But let me tell you some things you need to consider first, before we get into the games. One thing you might want to think about the time of day to do your Bible Drill outside? Obviously it's a gorgeous night tonight. The temperatures are perfect, so maybe evening, or you can even do an early Saturday morning if you like. And the thing to think about is to maybe consider a shorter meeting time, like maybe 30 to 45 minutes. So you don't have to worry about the children going in and out to the bathroom in and out. Another thing you need to think about is your hand sanitizer and of course our mask, you don't need to decide if the children, the leaders are gonna wear a mask. Another thing to remember is obviously the social distance, and that is really easy to do when you're outside. Also have the children bring a camping chair or a towel or something to sit on, just so they can chill out and have that fellowship time together with each other. Also make sure that they use their hand sanitizer between the different games. And we'll be showing some of those in a minute with some bottles and all, and they want to make sure they clean their hands really good. Or you could even use gloves if you wanted to, but I would prefer the hand sanitizer. And also if you're doing it in the evening and it's a little bit warm have them bring a water bottle or even a snack to eat if they need to. So we have a lot of games that we're gonna be sharing with you on the ebook. I do wanna tell you about a couple tonight, and then we're gonna demonstrate a couple of them. Sidewalk chalk is a wonderful thing to use outside. They can write their Bible verses. The book of the Bible on the church sidewalk, I don't know if you've seen on Facebook lately. A lot of people are writing the scripture verses even on their driveway. You could even challenge the children to write their Bible verses on their driveway and make pictures and send to you. Another one of my favorites is the cup stacking. And some of you may already be doing this. If you take the books of the Bible and you can just buy the cheap styrofoam cups at the dollar store, I would buy a set for every child. Let that child set for the entire Bible Drill season. That way they're not touching and sharing. And what I did, I put like the books of the law in one color, the gospel in another color. And then they say, please stack them up and then see how fast they can stack them down. You can do it as a timed activity or just had to do it just for fun. Another activity to use is having bring a jump rope with them. I'm not gonna jump rope for you tonight. You can do that on your own, but have them to bring their own jump rope, or you can provide the jumper for them and just simply put their name on them. You can pick them up cheaply at the dollar store, and that can be their jump rope for the whole Bible Drill season. And when they do the jump rope, they can say the books of the Bible as they jump, or you can just do like the gospel books as they jump, or the books of the law as they jump, or they can just work on a Bible verse as they jumped through them. One activity we're gonna demonstrate tonight is the balloon toss and my husband and son have graciously volunteered give every child divide them into pairs. And they stand approximately six feet from each other. And they toss the balloon back and forth. As they say the books of the Bible, they take a small step back every time they say it. And the first team who makes it as far as they can with out dropping the balloon is the winners. Another way to change this up is to take a beach ball. If you don't want to blow up water balloons, you can take a beach ball and do the same thing. And then another variation is to take a football and toss it back and forth to each other, and say the books of the Bible, you can also do this with the Bible verses that they're learning. They can practice saying the Bible verses back and forth to each other. So that's a fun one. This is listed in your ebook. And then obviously when they get finished, they want to hand sanitize those hands again. Or you can have a washing station set up at your piles. And then the last one, if you happen to have a swimming pool or your neighbor has a pool close by, we have an above ground pool type two pool noodles, make a large circle, tighten together, lay that in the pool. And then I simply took a pool noodle and cut them into pieces and write the books of the Bible with the Sharpie. You toss the books of the Bibles in the pool noodle and then have the swimmers or the divers, however you want to call it, go in and close their eyes, pull a book out and then named the book before. And the book after, you can also do this by just teaching like the gospels or the books in the law. You can also do this with a Bible verse, write them on the different pool noodles. Another variation you can do is divide them and the two teams have one same big green one team be orange tell them that if you have a large pool, I have the orange team, gather up all the books of the Bible, put them in order the green team, do the same thing and see who does it first. So these are just a few ideas for the outdoors. The sky is literally the limit outside. So we're going to get back to Maria. Marie I think you've got some awesome tips for us as leaders.

- Yes, thank you, Deborah. Those lit like lots of fun. Thank you to your family for demonstrating those games for us. We also have a tip section in our ebook and just some observations that I'm sure many of you have noticed our families right now, they're stressed out. They're overwhelmed. The decisions that have been involved in how to go back to school, do we do virtual school? Do we do in person school? Or perhaps our family may choose to homeschool job situations of many of our kids, families, health concerns and other stressors are really creating some anxiety and those feelings of being overwhelmed because of COVID-19 and the sheltering in place time that many of our families have had some have had chosen to shelter in place for even longer periods of time than our state governors have requested and have asked. So as leaders, we need to be very sensitive to our families, to these feelings of them being overwhelmed. So we need to be sensitive understanding and encouraging as we work with our Bible Drillers, as we encourage our families. And I know you leaders are great at doing that. Many of you have been working with Bible Drill for many years, but I heard that this week I was re-reminded just about the stresses that our families, our kids families are under today. And just to note of how important it is for us to show sensitivity as we reach out, we minister to them and being extra sensitive to the Holy spirit and being even more intentional to pray for these drillers and their families. So a few tips we offer for kind of staying connected with drillers and just thinking through how do we do Bible Drill in this socially distance world? So as we, you've probably heard different leaders allude to, there are several different ways to stay connected. So if you're not meeting in person on your church campus, there's many ways that you can connect with your drillers. We talked, of course you can connect via Zoom. David shared some great ideas and illustrations, how they had connected with phone calls, with texts this summer with the families porch drop-off, that you can drop-off some of the Bible skill activities for the week that you're gonna be having the kids do engage them. And it allows a porch drop-off standing out in the yard and talking to the family the porch allows you a way to connect with your drillers with their families. Perhaps I'm putting some of the activities in the Mail team, kids as well as adults love getting mail. So that's a great opportunity to have a surprise in the mailbox for your Bible Drillers, to have an opportunity for them to come up to the church, to pick up some of these things and to do a dropout like many of the churches had for vacation Bible school. They can do this also for some of your Bible Drill activities. Just communicate those details to the families. Of course, the Zoom calls as we mentioned, and those phone calls to the drillers and to their family. So those are some ways that we can stay in touch with them. I was reminded of the importance of having nuggets for our families because of their sense they're overwhelmed. So I put a little few ideas in this E-resource ebook about some Bible Drill nuggets. We may have to break down Bible Drill into very small bites for our families, because as they're going back to school and figuring out how to do Zoom, what to do in school classrooms virtually with Zoom or doing in-person school or doing a hybrid of both families have a lot that they're juggling on their plates. So we can break it down into small pieces. Belinda and David are sharing this great at home pace. Maybe even decide the way to break that down into a nugget not to give them the whole resource all at once. Perhaps you may choose to give them the resource on a weekly basis. Maybe you're meeting in person for a few weeks and you can send that home. And then all of a sudden your church has to go back to meeting virtually. And so you do a porch drop off of those resource items for the week or for the month with your families. Another way is to send texts, to send a weekly or some leaders even send daily texts to their parents and remind them of the verse, or just send a word of encouragement, send a fun activity or discussion question for them to do with the Bible Drill verse. I thought a great thing to do is you could send them a text about six o'clock when some of our families are having suffer and give them Bible Drill challenge, maybe to discuss the verse around the table, to see if they can quote the verse or a fun activity that they can enjoy around the family meal table, but come up with creative ways where you can break it down in buy it as pieces. As Belinda had already to you about the Bible Drill Bibles with us, looking at potentially having to do at home Bible Drill, virtual Bible Drill, having that option for kids to have a Bible Drill Bible at home, which I think is really something that we as a churches probably want to look at where we can help kids reinforce those Bible skills, even though we're not meeting together in person. And then everybody loves process. I have enjoyed getting all the pictures and we're still receiving pictures, and I'm gonna be doing a drawing. I've already got your names. I'm writing them down on pieces of paper, who we'll be drawing for our draw verse challenge that put out there to you but put a challenge out to your kids. Our kids ministry our church this summer challenged our kids to memorize I think it was the books of the old Testament and she had a gift card to every kid that would send her a video, quoting the books of the Bible. So we got to see some great videos of kids and our kids' ministry at church quoting the old Testament books of the Bible in our kids' ministry Facebook group, and to see them quoting those books of the Bible. And so think about Chick-fil-A gift card, a gift card for ice cream scoops is a popular ice cream place around where I live in Monroe, Georgia. And so if kids had a Chick-fil-A gift card or a scoop, that would just be, a five or $10 gift card to challenge your kids, keep them a little motivated in these times that can be a really fun thing. Have perhaps a favorite candy drop off for the kids, give them a little challenge. And if they meet that challenge drop off their favorite candy on their porch, or maybe even create some teams virtually and give them a challenge and then let them have a pizza party and deliver a little Caesar's pizza to the family's house or to the two or three participants on the team that won that challenge I've even heard. And when kids ministry group drew for smores kit, that would be a great thing to offer this fall is to put together some smores kits for your Bible Drill families is one of the prizes for the challenges. So those are some fun ways that we can keep kids engaged and excited about what's happening in Bible Drill. A few other ideas that we want to share with you as Belinda and Deborah, both kind of alluded to in some of their discussions is having some individual activities, whether you're meeting in person, outside, or whether the kids are working on their Bible skill activities at home, just those inexpensive items that have they mentioned such as cups, craft sticks, sticky notes. I'm sure you can add some other great ideas to the list, but just thinking that no matter which way you're meeting, whether it be your strategy for the year or for the week or for the month, just keep in mind that it's really important to have those individual activities for them. And then as we're kind of drawing our tips to a conclusion, one thing is that I think we're probably gonna find many of us are gonna find ourselves choosing a hybrid approach. We may be able to meet in person for a short while at church, and then find ourselves moving virtually or perhaps transitioning to meeting outside. We're still trying to make that decision for the Bible Drill class that I teach at our church. We're trying to decide do we begin meeting outdoors, or are we gonna meet virtually? We're still touching base with some of the kids' families to see what they're ready to do. So I think that that's very important for us to think and not just to think we have to choose one particular strategy. So Belinda, I'm gonna pass it back to you. I'm sure we're having some questions now and want to see what our leaders are saying.

- Thanks, Maria, I appreciate all of you sharing and giving us those great tips for the four ways to do Bible Drill or Bible Skills in a socially distance world. We have had a few questions come in from our, that have been emailed to Doug. And one of those was Maria and Deborah you maybe wanna get ready to answer this if you have any ways to teach music through Bible Drill. And when you're thinking about that, I will add that we forgot to tell you that we have five videos that will be in the ebook and in the other at home resource that you can use that are sign language, they are signed from five different Bible verses. So you can use those to teach those Bible verses to your children, or the parents can teach them. And they're offered in ASV CSB and in KJV. So Deborah and Maria do having suggestions about music.

- We in Georgia and we list this Pinterest board. We have a Bible Drill Pinterest board, and one of our boards share some books of the Bible songs that I think are age appropriate for our kids and for students about age appropriate I mean, because we know that there are some great ones for teaching preschoolers, but looking to find some that would appeal to our preteens, our middle schoolers. And so we have some on that as well as some different music for some of the Bible Drill versus with that. Now you've probably also got some creative people in your church that could come up with some music. So I think a lot of times it's looking around to find that that creativity with those in your church. Deborah, do you have any ideas?

- As far as the music I don't have we have access to the sign language at our church, which has been phenomenal. I think you're right there Maria, that I'm sure that a lot of our churches have a lot of talented people who could write their own songs and if you do write some sharing with us, we'd love to hear them. I'm sure there's a lot of youth that are talented. That'd be a great way to get the youth involved with the children and helping to write some of the songs, the verses the song.

- I know one thing we've done in our Bible Drill class is we will let the kids come up with their own song. Our children's minister, David Lyon at our church has done this several times as he's taught at our retreat in Alabama. And he lets them think of a popular song or a worship song that they already know and put words to the Bible verse to that song. And so they have really, really enjoyed that and the ones that I've done that way, they I always remember that verse, they will be bouncing around when they say when they're caught doing the verse in their heads. So that's been a real good, fun way to do it. Also, we had someone ask about how to use art in learning Bible verses. So does either one of you have a suggestion for that?

- Well, as you know, Belinda, we do have a couple of items in at least two or three items that I can think of in this ebook that we shared for outdoors. We've got some fun things to do with sidewalk chalk and meeting outdoors that you could do, whether it's at home, the kids could do in their driveway, or you could do in the church parking lot. If they give you permission to decorate some of the parking's places and get creative in designing those with sidewalk chalk and sharing the Bible verses that way. I think that'd be a great encouragement for people coming to church on Sunday morning for worship is to see those versus in the parking lot. We had the draw verse, which you could get very creative with. You could use all kinds of different art supplies for that so and we do have some different things on our Pinterest page. I haven't looked lately, but I think we've got over 400 ideas uploaded for teaching kids, Bible skills and so forth. So a lot of them, there were a lot of neat art things too. And, so that would be great. I did a blog article that I'll share the link in a few minutes. I did that using art to do some Bible skill activities, right when we were going into that sheltering in place. So I'll try to get the link up to that in just a minute.

- Maria, another idea is I know a lot of our nursing homes can't even see their families right now. And so you can have your child make a card and put one of the Bible verses in it and decorate that card with the Bible verse and then send it to your local nursing home as a mission project.

- That's great Deborah, I know also in one of our activities for that at home resource, we talk about using some adding tape and letting them create a comic strip for one of the key passages. So that would be another whole art way to do that. I did see in the chat that someone said, that dry erase markers on Amazon really cheap, and that would be another, that, and a dry erase board would be another good resource and things to have to put in the bags. Karen North, from Georgia wanted to know if we have any other ideas for youth in high school Bible drill, I know many of these can be adapted to the children's level, but wonder if there were more specific for the older kids and Maria, I guess you might want to answer that. I think you've thought about that some.

- Yes, that there's some for right now, we had obviously focused on the children because I know in each of our States that is probably the larger number of drillers that we do have, but the youth is something that I'm hoping to focus on and share some blog articles in the coming weeks, some resources, how this ebook can be adapted really easy for our youth and our high schoolers. 'Cause a lot of the ideas that you'll find in here, they would work equally well with middle schoolers, with high schoolers and they're not verse specific, their ideas like Deborah shared, like I shared, so you could pick which verses you wanted to do it. So they would work very well with youth and high schoolers. Also, hopefully this fall, we're gonna also share some youth at home devotional resources and some, other teaching tips for our youth in high school, that will be a help. But our first thrust was to go ahead and try to address the children's Bible Drill because we find that our children's driller are less, I guess you would say self motivated to work on their own. I mean, just because of their age, many of our high schoolers we saw, especially in Georgia, that our high schoolers really hung in there with it because they studied more of their own and so forth. It was a little easier for them to be self motivated and to keep going and learn in the verses. So, but we had to have some more of that out in the coming weeks.

- Thank you, Maria. Sharon Howard is at Mountain view Baptist church in Birmingham and she asked if we knew of a place where we could get Bibles at a reduced cost. So wanted to see if y'all would address that.

- I think just looking somewhere, it depends on which translation that you use. I encourage our leaders in Georgia to look in a variety of places in Georgia. We use the King James, the CSB and the ESV. And I think that Amazon could be an option. Sometimes Amazon will just run sales. There was one year that I was ordering ESV Bibles for our church and they were like, buy three, get one free. And then I had free shipping with Amazon Prime. So I was able to get our Bible Drill Bibles for a cheaper price. Also sometimes Christianbook.com will offer some of the drill Bibles. Now I know that's where I purchased some of the ESV, but I think with Lifeway doing total online sales, I would just watch between LifeWay's website. If you use the CSB or the KJV watch an Amazon and check maybe some other online options, just maybe put that skew number in your Google and see what you come up with. That's what I do sometime. Just see what kind of sales somebody may be running on the Bible Drill Bibles.

- Thanks Maria, then Karen North, also ask if anyone has any ideas about trying to have a location to upload songs and different activities and things like that when general location to have those type resources for Bible Drill. I know we have talked about doing that and it's a little bit tricky with trying to get things on each other's websites and just have a website totally devoted to that. So I can answer that first. And then I think Maria might want to add something and Deborah too, but I would encourage all of you to check our websites frequently. We are collaborating a lot these days within state conventions and we are sharing ideas and putting them on each other's websites constantly. It's been amazing how much this group has really worked together. Children, preschool ministers, I've seen student ministers and students associates at state convention level. We're all working together. We all have the same goal. And so we're sharing a lot of resources. So check your Bible Drill website or your convention website for different things that will be uploaded. I know in the chat we have those listed. So go ahead and save those if you need to or write them down because the chat will disappear after we disconnect tonight. So if you need to go ahead and do that, but just keep checking back with us because we're working towards doing these things as you know this pandemic really hit us fast and we are working as hard as we can to get more and more resources out because we know those are things that y'all really need to do or need to have.

- And Belinda, I know that as we've shared, we do have a Pinterest board I try to keep that updated, but that can be a place sharing on Pinterest, as Belinda said, our different websites. I know just recently Deborah shared some great resources, the verse ring cards. And so we, we shared there on North Carolina's website, they developed them, but they shared them with both of us. And so I posted them on our website with a big thanks to North Carolina for sharing those with us, instead of trying to do that, our website and Georgia's a little bit different since now we are a separate nonprofit, but Georgia Baptist Bible Drill and speakers inc, and are not a direct ministry, any longer of the Georgia Baptist mission board. So ours is able to function a little bit differently than a conventions website. And so we do have blog articles and we're able to upload different files and so forth. But like we said, it's kinda hard to find just one place where we can do it just because of the volume of files and so forth. So it is a good idea just to routinely check your own state's website because we are sharing those resources together. Michelle Carruthers asked, do we know yet if there's any kind of deadline to have everything completed by and I guess if you would, Michelle, if you got a little bit more detail on that question, that would be great if you're talking about Bible Drill, Bible Drills normally take place in the spring every year, they're different in each state and Alabama, they start in April with our regional drills churches and associations have there's mainly in March and then they're finalized by the end of April or 1st of May. And I think that's the general time zone. I know in Georgia they go a little bit later into May. And in North Carolina, they may finish a little bit earlier, but the spring is where we have our goal to have drills and competitions. And we are all hoping that we're going to be able to do that again next year, we were sad that we didn't get to meet together this past year, but we do hope and pray that we will be able to, but Maria was had success with having virtual drills. I know a couple of churches in Alabama did some virtual drills. So if we are all still in the pandemic era and we can't have a drill in person, we will be helping you. I know we will work hard to help that, especially if you're having to navigate through something that we haven't done before with virtual drills. And then also let's see, I missed a question. I think this one is from that for David, David they wanted to know where you got those cool glasses that you were talking about.

- Internet is your friend found them on Amazon actually I'll put a link in the chat for that for that. But again, for most of the kids, we found everything we needed on Amazon of Oriental trading, Rhode Island, novelty, SNS, worldwide. And really, if we found something that we really liked, like on Steve Spangler, we saw it. We tried to see how it could home make it without hands on Amazon. And then if we could do that, we just use items from the house as well. So, but yeah, I will send a link to the chat about what the glasses came from. Pretty cool stuff for our sport week.

- Thank you, David and Maria, someone asks how they can get to your Pinterest board. And can you tell us what that's labeled as?

- Yes I take what I'll put a direct link to the Pinterest page and that'll probably be the easiest way for them to find it.

- It also said that someone put in the Oriental trader has great items as well for Bible Drill purposes. If you're sending items handed to them and they do an in our ebook, if we provide a lot of those links just to direct you straight to those and I don't know that it's in the ebook. I think it's in the family Bible skills, got that David did, he's got a lot of those listed. I will tell you that we do have a bookmark for the books, the Bible on there, that you can just print off. If you would like to do that. That's from the Alabama website that we provide for our Bible Drill leaders. So it's broken down by division. So if you would like to provide a bookmark for them in your packet of at home things that something that that's already there. So I don't see any more questions. If anybody's got any more questions we would love to have those. I will say that people are writing a lot of things in the chat that are very beneficial. Let me read through a couple of things. Cindy Thomas she's an Alabama girl. She got some Bibles, she said some from CBD. And I know that they, Christian book distributors have had them in the past. So that may be another resource to get Bibles out. And someone said the Gideon sometimes will help if you're just looking for Bibles, Mercy Akins put a link of where to teach preschool has a lot of really good Zoom games or some excellent suggestions for drawing for children and on Zoom and then also some Bible Drill art ideas Maria put that on. So y'all may want to scroll down through the chat real quick before we dismiss and just make sure that you haven't missed what others have chatted and we will be sending out. I think Doug can send out to the participants the chat, and we will try our best to do that. And if there's something you miss, please don't hesitate to get in touch with me. And I will try to link you up with that before we our Doug says, I'm seeing it now that he's gonna be able to include that, all that information in an email. David, do you have anything you'd like to add or share before we go?

- Thank you so much for allowing me to be a part of it. If you enjoy the resource about using at home. I'm very glad that God was able to use me to do that. If you have any complaints, Ms. Belinda's the person to talk to. No, I really enjoyed being a part of this. We're relatively new when it comes to Bible Drills. And so we wanted to hop in. And so we did all 25 verses at one time, I love the idea of breaking it up and that way you're constantly in communication with the families. Communication is key when it comes to this kind of stuff.

- Thank you, David, we really, really appreciate what you did to help us with this resource. And I do want to tell, thanks to Doug Rogers. He helped host the meeting tonight and he keeps us on track and has been putting things in the chat. And it's just at an extreme great help to us at the Alabama Baptist State Board of Mission. So we wanna thank him and also for to Maria and Deborah for collaborating in this resource, it's been fun to work together. And we really have been prayed that it's something that your churches and families can benefit from. Okay, Deborah, if you wanna close this in prayer.

- Yeah, let's close in prayer. And I wanna say thank you to Belinda and Maria and David and Doug for helping us out tonight. It's been a wonderful webinar, so we appreciate it. So let's go to the Lord in prayer, father God, as we just humbled ourselves before you and Lord, we thank you for this time that we have had together. Lord, it is an unusual time to be able to concentrate and learn on your word. Father we just thank you for your grace father we just pray for the ears and the eyes that have seen and heard this webinar tonight. And the Lord, maybe something we have said that you have used us to say that has helped them and helped release my stress about the upcoming year for Bible Drill, father most of all, we just pray that your word will be hidden into the hearts of our children and our youth and our teenagers. And even the families Lord who do not know, you as their personal savior, Father we just pray that the tools that you have given us will be used to reach these families. Lord, we just love you and thank you for your grace and guard us and keep us safe in all that we do in Jesus name I pray, amen, okay.

- Good night everybody. Thank you all for joining.

- Good bye, thank you

- Bye, bye.

- Good bye.