Experience.FellowshipOne.com

Hi,

My ministry leader is asking me to totally set up his rooms/locations for children's ministry by grade level for our grade school area.  We only have 2 grade school rooms where currently our 1st - 3rd graders are in 1 room and our 4th and 5th graders are in the other room.  Now he is thinking he wants to set up a room for each grade level.  I am not sure I want to change our set up.  I would like to know how other churches track grade level for grade school children. 

Do you use attributes?  Breakout groups?  Let me know!  Thanks! 

cshelton

 

One way to do this would be by creating an attribute group along the lines of "HS Graduation Class" with attributes such as "2009 - 12th Grade", "2010 - 11th Grade" and so on.  You could just use the year by itself as well, but the text can be helpful to know what grade is associated with the year.  It also gives you an easy way to rename a handful of attributes to change grades around as opposed to trying to move people from one grade to another.  I don't know if that will meet your needs or not, but it would allow a way to tie in the current grade to each people in a way that's relatively easy to maintain.

For Him,

-Peter Schott

In our children's ministry we have three rooms, The General Store, The Diner, and The Garage. Those are set up in the activity grouping as the Super Groups, and then the activity group would be Kindergarten, 1st grade, 2nd grade, and so on. Then we have the actual rooms broken down into Kindergarten, 1st Grade, 2nd Grade, etc. This is really nice for reporting purposes and for working with them in the classrooms because they are broken up in the rooms by grade.

Another plus to doing it this way is that come promotion time, you can run a couple of reports and see the regular attenders for each grade level so everyone knows what to expect when kids move up. It was nice seeing how many of the kids were coming up into Kindergarten from Preschool so we had enough volunteer presence.

We then use the graduation year attribute for the seniors who graduate come promotion time so we can keep up with them. :)

 Hopefully that all makes sense!

---

Whitney Storey
Database Manager
East Bayou Church
(337)-984-8291

We also track by grade level:

Activity:   Elementary

Activity Group:  Elementary

Room:  Grade Level

If you have your rooms set up as 1st-3rd and 4th-5th could you change those to the Activity groups with the Rooms by grade level?

Activity - Elementary

2 Activity Groups -  1st-3rd  and   4th-5th

Room:  Grade Level

 It always takes some thought when making data changes.

Jaine

Thank you all for your ideas/replies.  I have had complaints in the past that reports were a lot longer and more complicated when the area was setup by grade level.  Can you give me some specific report numbers that you use with your children's ministry set up this way.  For example for staffing schedules and attendance and so on. 

You guys are the best.  Thanks for all your input!

Blessings,

cshelton

For attendance in the preschool, children, and student ministries, we like report M1119 specifically. For schedules we use a different report every time we need the information depending on who needs the information and what they need, so I'm afraid I won't be a lot of help. I've found that the report library almost always has a report to help us get the information we need, even set up like we are. On the odd occasion there isn't a report that has enough or exactly what we need, it's usually a matter of asking them to modify/enhance a report, which doesn't take nearly as long as requesting a brand new report. :)

Sorry I can't be more specific, but I hope this helps!

---

Whitney Storey
Database Manager
East Bayou Church
(337)-984-8291

Wouldn't that mean we would have to up date the text every year? 

Example:

We sent a freshman class with the attribute Grad. 2013 - 9th Grade, every year we will need to update the attribute to the next grade level.  

 Is there a way to set the grade of a individual record and set a "promotion date" where it will automatically promote to the next grade level?

 Thanks

Greg

---

Greg Ballard
Grace Fellowship
Guest Service and byGrace Leader
Office: 518-785-4959 ext. 303
Cell: 518-528-6622
email: gballard@gracefellowship.com
blog: http://gballard.wordpress.com

To my knowledge there isn't anything in F1 that lets you set an automatic promotion date, though that would be very handy. You should submit that to the "ideas" section in the F1 Community!

 I wouldn't recommend putting the grade level into the attribute name. I would simply leave it as "Class of 2013" and then you won't have to worry about updating it come promotion every year. If you really want to have the grade in the attribute name, it would just be a matter of editing the names, which isn't a huge deal.

---

Whitney Storey
Database Manager
East Bayou Church
(337)-984-8291