Sunday-School Success: A Book of Practical Methods for Sunday-School Teachers and OfficersWells, Amos R. (Amos Russel)
Religion
Sunday-School Success: A Book of Practical Methods for Sunday-School Teachers and Officers
Wells, Amos R. (Amos Russel)
Sunday schools
Learn to find pictures all through the Bible. I have just been searching
my mind for a Bible text that promised nothing in the way of a picture.
At last I thought that "All have sinned and come short of the glory of
God" would do. But in another second two pictures popped into my mind. I
saw a river whose further bank was beautiful with flowers and trees, the
paradise of "the glory of God," and across the river a bridge--lacking
its final portion. I saw a ladder reaching up into some golden clouds
back of which shone heaven, the city of "the glory of God"; but all the
top rounds of the ladder were missing. Bridge and ladder had "come
short." God's hand was needed, reaching across, reaching down, to help
us over the sin-gap into "the glory of God." I do not believe it
possible to find any Bible texts, still less any twelve consecutive
verses of the Bible, that do not hide somewhere a capital picture.
Read your Bible pictorially. Make sketches everywhere upon the margin.
For practice, often take some passage sure to come up in the
International Lessons, such as Psalm 1, Isaiah 53, Proverbs 3,
Matthew 5, Luke 2, John 14, Acts 9, Romans 12, 1 Corinthians 13,
Hebrew 11, James 3. Delve into the passage, meditate long over it, and
see how many pictures you can get out of it.
Of the greatest assistance will be a book,--indexed as to texts, and
also as to subjects, such as "temperance," "missionary,"
"resurrection," "courage,"--in which you will preserve every drawing
you make, and all the most suggestive blackboard hints you clip from
the teachers' magazines, together with simple outlines of all sorts of
common subjects. These last will be particularly useful. There will be
a ladder, an anvil, a horse, a lily, a broom, a fountain,--anything
likely to be of use for a symbol. You will clip these from
advertisements, catalogues, the illustrated papers and magazines, and
you will find your collection useful in many ways.
I have spoken as if the teacher should do all the blackboard work. On
the contrary, he should do none that he can get his scholars to do for
him. No matter if they do not do it as well as he. Get them to
practise beforehand. Let them begin with only the simplest work; they
will soon astonish you with their proficiency. And the class will take
far more interest in a poor drawing by one of their own number than in
a good drawing by you.
Yes, and even when you preside at the blackboard yourself, give the
class pencils and paper occasionally, and let them copy what you draw.
Their attention will be assuredly fixed, and an ineffaceable
impression made on their memory. The drawings they complete, however
crude, they will be glad to carry home to show their parents, and
treasure as souvenirs of the lesson, or keep, if you choose, against
the coming review day. If you use this method, you will soon come to
cherish a deeper liking for that prime pedagogical virtue, simplicity.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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