[Kid Inspiration]

Unlike Dave I’m not all that great at technical mumbo jumbo… you could say I’m not on the ‘bleeding edge’. However what I do love and am passionate about is leadership and preaching. From my posts you can expect to get leadership tips and ideas on how to communicate more effectively to children.

In my opinion one of the most important aspects of communicating to children is FUN. In order to capture a childs attention and maintain it throughout a lesson one must take into account how entertaining you are to listen to. Obviously every communicator is different and we don’t all have to be hillariously funny or amazingly crazy but we do all need to be creative in how we communicate so that children listen and learn!

Lately I have been experimenting with a communication style that would be best known as Toy Box Tales. I got this from Ps Karl Bastian after veiwing his website. Basically you take toys and get them to act out the story you are telling to the children. If you have a smaller number of kids you can just do it directly in front of the children, however if you have a large group they will not all be able to see. This is where the technical part comes in. In order to allow all children to see and to avoid a riot of kids trying to push to the front you can use a normal video camera and with the right equipment can link it to your projector screen so all can see on the screens. To see how this is done simply click on the following link.

Like most of you out there, when I started I didn’t have a full set of toys with a background or anything so I just connected with a family from my church who have stacks of toys and planned my lessons by using their toys. When I was on stage however I referred to them all as MY TOYS because kids want me to be into the same things as them…little tip - never refer to the toys you use as your childs toys or a friends toys they must always be YOUR TOYS…this helps you connect with kids!

I ended up getting a castle as a background and used a heap of his figurines and spoke about the armour of God…it was a blast and worked brilliantly! I attempted to record it but like I said i’m prehistoric when it comes to technical things so made a mistake and couldn’t film it! Next time I record it and will post it on the blog for you all to see.