This past August, I became the 4th/5th Grade Director at Menlo Park Presbyterian Church. Prior to that I had overseen everything in children’s ministry at my previous churches. It was an amazing thing to be able to spend time on a more focused age span. One of the biggest things that sprang up working with the 4th and 5th grade was how to transition kids from 5th grade (children’s ministry) to 6th grade (middle school ministry). If we don’t successfully hand off the kids and their parents, we run the inevitability of losing those kids in a few short months.
I was excited to sit in on Dan Scott’s breakout on transitions for 5th and 6th grades. Dan shared about the demographics, sociology, and development of pre-teen kids. It was great because there is a lot of misinformation and missed information regarding the tween age group. We make assumptions of these kids based on our memories of when we were their age. We can’t do that! Today’s tweens grew up and developed in a world that is galaxies apart from the world we were a part of when we were their age.
Click on the link below to download the notes from Dan’s breakout.
Thanks for these notes! Not only working with this age group- but parenting them, these notes are very relevant to me personally! Glad you got some good stuff!! Did your whole team from MPC go? – g
yup! we were all able to go