Guest Post: Illustrated Children's Moments

Today I'm really excited to bring a guest blog from Adam at Illustrated Children's Moments.  This is a new resource that will really help children to engage with the Bible.  There are free resources too!  Be sure to check out the website...

I’ve often come to Flame Creative Kids for ideas and resources for my ministry in the past, so it’s a great honor to be here today sharing with you about Illustrated Children’s Moments. Through this new venture, I’m creating original artwork for use with children’s ministry and helping to bring the Bible to life for kids.

On November 16, we are releasing four brand new products: 1) Advent materials and resources for churches, 2) engaging and interactive Advent materials for families to use at home, 3) Five Advent coloring sheets, and 4) an Advent Coloring Poster pack. I wanted to share with you about two items today that will hopefully give you an idea of what we’re all about.

Illustrated Children’s Moments

Children’s Moments during worship can be done so poorly, and I thought if teachers and pastors had creative resources to help them with storytelling, perhaps we could take some of the pressure off of them, and simply focus on telling kids the biblical story.

For example, a few weeks ago I preached on the story about Jacob wrestling with God. I created the below image for that post, and used that as a visual aid while I was telling the children the story. But I also printed out smaller versions that they could take home to remember the story. And that was one of the most important pieces for me. In my last church, I kept giving the kids these little 4x6 sized copies of my illustration, and parents started telling me that their kids would bring up the bible stories throughout the week and it gave the family some opportunities to have meaningful and formational conversations.

Coloring Sheets

At least here in the United States, coloring (and adult coloring) is quite popular right now. Knowing that, and really enjoying zentangle art, I made five Advent coloring sheets that will be available on November 16 as well. There will be a few different options for purchasing them, and I think there will be many different uses that you could find exciting for children’s ministry, or intergenerational events.

Below is a photo of my son, Caleb, in his pre-school class coloring a coloring sheet enlarged to 4 feet by 3 feet. At one point, there were about eight preschoolers all sitting around the table coloring the giant coloring sheet, all talking about what they thought the word “Holy” meant (which was in the middle of that particular coloring sheet). Their teacher said they had a wonderful conversation and the kids got a lot out of it.

Not your traditional Sunday School lesson, but apparently the kids paid better attention and listened more when they were engaged in a physical activity like coloring.

These are just two ideas from the resources that are available through Illustrated Children’s Moments.

If either of these interest you, I’d encourage you to go to our website and sign up for our email newsletter. When you do that, you’ll get five free illustrations and a leader guide for those illustrations. Also at our site are links to all of the places online you can like and follow Illustrated Children’s Moments (Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, Tumblr and Instagram).