Does this scenario sound familiar? It’s Saturday night. You’ve had a busy week and you are only now getting to your Sunday School lesson. As you look over the curriculum, it looks like an unsorted pile of Bible verses and life lessons and you need to turn it into something coherent for the kids in your class tomorrow morning. If you fail in this task, you’ll have a bunch of blank faces staring back at you. So where do you start? How do you quickly gain some structure? What’s an easy template to build a lesson around?
Lawrence O. Richards in his book Creative Bible Teaching presents an approach to structuring a Sunday School lesson that has been used by hundreds of children’s ministry volunteers since he first wrote about it in 1970.
“We call it the HBLT approach. That stands for Hook, Book, Look, Took. Don’t worry, we already know it’s a bit corny, but that’s why you will never forget it! It is an easy-to-remember approach to lesson preparation that, when followed, opens up the student to learning Biblical truth and to making meaningful application of the truth in his or her life.” (Creative Bible Teaching, Lawrence Richards)
In this series, I am going to expand on each of the 4 elements in this approach and give practical tips and ideas for using this method of planning a lesson.
Easy Template for Building a Lesson Series