I came from a background in Kid’s Ministry, mainly from Sunday mornings.  After the pandemic, Sundays have been running about 20-25 kids in Elementary.  CP on the other hand was running at about five.

I initially ran CP much like our Sunday mornings, with the same large group area, including worship, followed by small group(s).  It always seemed much harder to engage the kids, and their attention span was much lower.

Reading the CP curriculum and speaking with other reps seemed to suggest that CP’s tended to run with about 15-30 kids in them.  This was not our experience.

I took a quick poll in the CP Facebook group and discovered that there appeared a lot more CP’s the size of mine, rather than 15-20 kids.

At that point, we started to scale down what we were trying to do.

We now run CP around one table with about eight chairs.  I keep crafts off the table onto a second table until needed and use a tablet for the CP Slides (having loaded the slides from the USB drive into a Canva presentation).  The whole time is run as a discussion rather than as a large leader.

We have had one night with only one child.  We still continued through the material.  The connection the leaders had with that child was great.

Format-wise, we tend to stick to the main template:

• Free Play (all the room is allowed, but we have coloring activities on the table)
• Introduction – (At the table)
• Contemplative Worship (They didn’t want to sing with a low number – so we try and enable a quiet time, eyes closed prayer or a time of connection. Sometimes this is not possible if we have high energy/low concentration span kids)
• Teaching – led as a discussion.  (Last week we had a skit which was supposed to have three leaders, our teen helper played all three and exaggerated the changes between the characters – which was a fun twist).
• Transition to small group time – mainly we continue the conversation, use of the journal pages is optional for the kids, we append the prayer time to the small group at the end of “small group” time)
• Bathroom Break (we go as one group – whether it’s needed or not)
• Centers 1-3 (Often we’ll just do one and continue the discussion – we bring up the closing theme here – this is mostly done at the table – unless it’s a running activity, in which case we use the whole room)
• Snack Time
• Serenity Prayer
• Free Time

Speaking with a few other CR’s, much hunch is that most CPs run about 10% of the adult congregation. So, a group of 50 adults is likely to support a CP with five kids. Larger families with five/six kids in them can skew these numbers, and whose absence is felt strongly if they are missing.

We also have a Landing with about the same numbers.