Recently our children’s ministry team sat down to discuss scope and sequence. Our team creates the majority of the curriculum resources used during weekend services at our three campuses (both written and video), so this discussion was vital to the next stages of our curriculum process. We spent a block of time getting a picture of where kids are today and where kids will be in middle school. This is an important task in the our field! We need to know exactly where kids are and where they will end up.
Henry Jenkins, Director of the Comparative Media Studies Program at MIT, and a host of colleagues wrote a paper dealing with the subject of 21st Century Skills (which I came across in preparation for our team’s scope and sequence meeting). The article discusses several critical skills children should develop:
- Play — the capacity to experiment with one’s surroundings as a form of problem-solving
- Performance — the ability to adopt alternative identities for the purpose of improvisation and discovery
- Simulation — the ability to interpret and construct dynamic models of real-world processes
- Appropriation — the ability to meaningfully sample and remix media content
- Multitasking — the ability to scan one’s environment and shift focus as needed to salient details.
- Distributed Cognition — the ability to interact meaningfully with tools that expand mental capacities
- Collective Intelligence — the ability to pool knowledge and compare notes with others toward a common goal
Click here to download the entire article
What skills would be on your list of things children need to develop in terms of their relationship with God?
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