There has been a healthy discussion about whether or not to include Teens and Preschools in Rotation. That discussion has continued on the Ideas Exchange Message board at rotation.org. Many have responded with their experiences and ideas.

The general consensus is the preschoolers love the Rotation Model. In many rotation churches the preschoolers move to new workshop each week. In some rotation churches they rotate within their own classroom. There is a general consensus that Teens need something different than a classic Rotation of workshops. Many churches rotate right through the 8th grade. The consensus is that it works if your young teens have been in rotation for a few years and know nothing else, and if you put special teachers with that group who rotate with them.

: The following are excerpts from postings, emails and brief comments from various places on the subject of Teens and Preschoolers in Rotation....

From Wendy Gillette from Marcellus, New York. We have 51 youth in attendance here at the church. We are a small town with four churches on one corner. 21 were registered when I started working here. Awesome! Everyone loves the rotation here.

I do rotation with my teens but I do not actually rotate them into the different worskshops. I bring the workshops to them and they also produce the drama workshops and take them to the drama class. They also are creating puppets and beginning to write material for the fall rotation. I have 13 youth in that class and they come faithfully each week.

I also rotate my nursery class with a specific shepherd that works with them to understand the concept in each rotation. I have purchased childrens Bibles and have each of the rooms set up for younger and older youth. For instance, our art rotation lends itself to different projects geared to the ages for the week. It has worked well.
wendy@dreamscape.com

I think the 3 and 4 yr olds can really get a lot out of this model, and I think ours really like swapping rooms and getting the "whole" effect. In our old classes, the 3 yr-K class was so RESTLESS. You'd barely get into the canned lesson and they wanted a drink of water or to color or whatever. It was ROUGH! Since starting rotations, I have not seen a SINGLE restless kid! No more "is class over yet," "I'm hungry," or "I'm bored." Yeah!

So our 3 yr olds are in the regular rotation classes. We are experimenting with different age groupings. The first month we had 7th-8th graders in one class (they wanted to stay together), then 2 5th-6th graders in each of the other 3 classes, and all the rest of the kids sorted more or less by maturity into those 3 classes. This month we have a class of 7-8th, 5-6th, and then the 3yr-4th grade are evenly mixed into two classes. It works nicely to have kids mixed, they seem to behave better and the older ones help the younger ones a good bit. I do like sorting by maturity better than age because it is easier for the teachers to 'aim' thier message this week. We use the same curriculum for every class, but the teacher will choose easier/harder questions, make explanations simpler, alter a craft, allow for more/less student discussion, etc to allow for age/maturity. Terri Kimble, Gum Creek Pres., Oxford, GA
Terri, www.geocities.com/gumcreekpc