Are you itching to help get your Primary Teachers more involved in Singing Time? There’s no better time to start than right now in taking little steps and actions each week to help your Primary Teachers feel more welcomed, wanted, and needed!
First Things First!
First, remember these 3 tips to get started:
Invite & Remind the teachers to sing! They may not have even realized that they could or should be singing along. A simple invitation or reminder that you’d love to hear their voices supporting the children can go a long way.
Be Supportive of the Teachers – Keep in mind that your Primary teachers will come from a whole range of different experiences. Some may be converts that never attended Primary while others may not have been to Primary in decades!
Go easy on them, include them in your teaching activities, and give them extra help and support where needed (more on that below).
Thank Them for Participating – Praise and encouragement go a long ways both with your Primary kids and with their teachers! Make a point to call out the teachers once in a while, just like you would the kids, and recognize their singing!
It can be as simple as: “Thank you teachers for singing along, that sounded so beautiful today!”
10 Easy Ways to Include Primary Teachers in Singing Time
Let’s jump in with 10 easy ways that will help you get your teachers more involved in your lesson plans! Not only will it be more fun for them, you will find there’s more participation on their row, as well!
1. Give Them a Job
One super easy way to include your Primary teachers that will help them feel purposeful and also help you out is giving them a task relating to your activity. My favorite “job” is to let the teachers pass out and collect manipulatives for their individual class.
You can do this easily by preparing a canvase tote, gallon ziplock bag, cute container – whatever works for you. Stock it with just the supplies for that week if you have time to do so before church starts. This will make it easier and faster for them to gather and return the supplies and avoid distractions.
If you don’t have time, such as being a middle ward, you can instead just have a general bag with all the supplies. You can even ask them to grab it from the closet when they enter the room! As long as that is more helpful than distracting. 🙂
I got these cute ones embroidered with a different color for each class and hung them from a magnet on the back of the metal chair in front of each teacher. I share lots of organizational tips over in this post on what’s in my singing time bag!
2. Have Them Pick Your Helpers
The teachers can better keep tabs on the children in their row that might be trying extra hard or need that morale boost or being picked as a helper. Let the teachers help you pick volunteers from their class to participate, as needed.
This is also a wonderful way to help a new music leader learn the children’s names! Ask the teacher to call their helper by name when volunteering them so you get to know all of the kiddos names quicker.
3. Post the Lyrics
You really want your teachers to be on your side and singing along! Even if your children don’t need the words, chances are your teachers might!
Post the lyrics at the front of the room or pass out a small printable booklet (or a cute mini songbook) so they can feel more confident in joining in singing. I have a HUGE collection of Primary Flip Charts to help. When the teachers sing, the children in their row are more likely to participate as well!
4. Use the Teacher as Your Helper
If you have a large Primary or a particular activity that might be difficult to include the children, don’t be afraid to call on the Primary teachers to be your helper for the activity!
As a great example, the kids will love trying to help their teacher to guess the secret word in a game of Headbandz! They’ll feel so smart knowing the word and trying to sing out the keyword extra loud to help them guess correctly.
5. Make it a Competition vs the Teachers!
My Senior Primary children, especially the older boys, absolutely love anything that’s a competition! Instead of making it one side of the room against the other or boys vs girls, you can have all the children team up against the teachers!
They’ll love challenging the adults in the room and it will remind those leaders that they might want to be paying attention — they never know when they will be on the spot!
6. Give a Task to each Class
Assign a specific task to each of your classes. You can use envelope games, teach a specific line of the song, or even go as far as our Learn & Teach singing time idea to really get the kids involved!
This is a great way to give the kids (and the teacher) a chance to shine! Have each class comes up with hand actions for one line of the song, then teach those actions to the Primary.
7. Use Teachers as your Substitute
If you need to go out of town, consider asking one of the class teachers from each group to be your substitute. If they’ll be sitting in Singing Time during that time block anyways, they might love a chance to take the reins!
Give them an easy ready-made Singing Time lesson plan and let them try out the calling first hand. It will give them a new level of appreciate for the work and effort you put in, and they may come back with some fun ideas and feedback to help you out, too!
8. Let them participate!!
If you have enough supplies, make sure you pass them out to the teachers as well. They may feel a little silly at first, but pretty soon they’ll be marching and sway and swinging ribbon wands right along with the kids and having a blast during Singing Time!
9. Ask them questions
You can encourage more participation from your teachers by calling on them every so often to help answer a question. Don’t be afraid to call on the adults in the room to try to figure out what patterns they noticed or to try to crack the code.
I always plan for specific answers to questions for what I had in mind for the answer, and I’m always completely blown away by the kids responses! They come up with the BEST answers! But, sometimes it can be helpful to get around to your desired answer, too, and teachers can help provide different perspectives and insights the children may not have thought of.
10. Give them a special singing part
Some songs already naturally accommodate this idea, such as A Child’s Prayer or Teacher Do You Love Me, but you can make it work with a variety of songs and it will be a fun way to add something a little different to the Primary program.
- Assign a specific line
- Give them the 2nd or 3rd verse to learn
- Have them learn a descant
- Sing a second part in a round
- Sing the chorus in an alternate language
For another helpful post to make your calling easier, head over to see these 6 ideas for leading singing time without a pianist!
What are YOUR favorite ways to include the Primary teachers in Singing Time?
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