You may have wondered why Teach One Reach One has free resources for parents as well as volunteer teachers. We believe the most successful way of reaching children and teens is when the Church (and/or its faith based ministries) partner with the parents in meaningful ways. Too often there is little or no interaction between our classes and the parents. We may send home a flier about a large social event or VBS and whatever the child does in class, but usually that is all we do.
Many Christian parents were not raised in Christian homes. Other parents are struggling trying to meet the demands they feel society places on them and have no idea how to introduce God into their homes. Some parents even struggle with the basics of training children in godly ways. If the Church does not step up and help these parents, we reduce the amount of meaningful, life-changing, eternity-changing instruction and practice our children and teens will receive.
We encourage you to look through our resources and share them with the parents of your students. We have a parenting blog that publishes tips, books to read, ideas for fun activities and more, three days a week. Our Parenting Like Hannah Facebook page offers daily parenting challenges five days a week. If your parents follow @tswinnett on Twitter, each day they will get two tweets of practical verses to share with their kids.
Want your parents to follow up your lessons by studying them again at home during the week? In parent letters or emails, you can give them the direct link to the Bible lesson you or your teachers used. The parents will have the scripture written on a third grade reading level to read to their kids, the main points you hoped the children would get from the lesson and some interesting facts. If your parents are new Christians, this will help them study and understand the scriptures better themselves.
If your parents want to study with their children to help them become Christians, there is a free baptism study with a leader’s guide which will help them study without the stress of wondering what to do. If you have homeschool families, they may want to use our academic extension activities to review the Bible story and teach or review some academic skills at the same time.
Children’s ministry is ultimately family ministry. Take advantage of our free resources and help support your families in their efforts to dedicate their children to God.