The middle school / high school / youth group lessons were created for a 45-minute
class period. However, the lessons can easily fill an hour-long class period. Each
lesson contains the same components of: “Opening Question,” “Movie Clip,” “Reading
of Scripture Story,” “Discussion and Teaching about the Scripture Story” and “Activity.”
Teaching objectives for the lesson and a list of required materials are also included.
Lessons were created with these long-term educational objectives in mind
- Increase Biblical literacy. Each lesson is centered around a Bible story. I focus
primarily on the stories because students remember stories with ease and because
the choices of the characters often generate robust class discussion.
- Highlight the universal and relevant themes in the Bible stories. The main purpose
of the movie clips is to show how the themes in the Bible stories often mirror the
themes of current day storytellers while providing some modern context of those themes.
- Invite personal sharing as a way to strengthen community. The “Opening Question”
section of the lesson is meant to encourage students and teachers to share of themselves
while also drawing connections between their lives and the lives of the Bible story
characters.
For high school classes, I’ve found the “activity section” of the lesson to not always
be beneficial. You may want to experiment with not using the activity section with
your high school classes.
Note that each lesson is fully-written. I highly recommend using a printed version
of the lesson as a script when teaching. I teach with a co-teacher and we assign
sections to each other. Using the lesson plan as a script, then, helps us transition
between our teaching assignments.
It is recommended that you use the lessons in the order in which they are grouped
on the page. The lessons build upon and refer back to discussions from previous lessons.
However, each year of lessons stand alone. The overall goal of these pages is to
provide four years of high quality lessons that can then be reused once a four-year
cycle is completed. If you are using these lessons for both middle school and high
school, then this approach won’t work since you will need an eight-year cycle of
lessons. However, if you use the rfour.org Confirmation lessons, then you have a
fifth year of lessons to work with that will amplify and continue the themes from
the youth lessons).