The Year We Banned Construction Paper from our Sunday School: A Rotation Model Story

During our second year of starting the Rotation Model at the Presbyterian Church in Barrington illinois, our DCE and I BANNED CONSTRUCTION PAPER from the entire Sunday School. We literally collected it all up and locked it in a closet.

It started as kind of a joke.  Just before we launched Rotation, we were cleaning out several supply closets and discovered what amounted to a 20 year supply of construction paper. Best collection ever!  Literally hundreds of dollars worth of paper that had been squirreled away in teacher's cabinets, and in one closet known as the "construction paper closet."

Many of our volunteers had become dependent on construction paper for their "craft time," and we needed them to start thinking about "art" rather than "craft."  So as a challenge, we LOCKED the construction paper closet and called it "the Year Without Construction Paper." And it worked!  It became a symbol of what we were striving for when it came to the "Art" Workshop, --which is to say, something more expressive, artistic, and durable than construction paper.

Speaking of hoarding...
In my first summer on the job, I asked our church secretary to order two dozen more sets of scissors and she asked me "What did they do with the dozens of scissors they have ordered over the years?  Eat them?"   Her question sent me searching through the backs of supply cabinets -- where we indeed found they had not been eating scissors. We had these large deep and dark rolling storage cabinets which somebody had spent a lot of money on, but which effectively served as black holes for supplies and trash dumps for old curriculum. We promptly rolled most of those out of the classrooms, and put supplies OUT where the teachers and kids could see them.

One reason the Rotation Model creates an Art Workshop is to centralize all your art supplies. The other workshops won't need "art" supplies. Neil posted the following after working with a team of lesson reviewers who were 'renovating' various forums here at Rotation.org.  These have since been updated.