Many people feel overwhelmed with the assignment to teach Sunday school. Often, it feels like you need a PhD in religion to be able to fully and accurately explain the Bible stories to your class, even if you are teaching children.

Children often ask the most profound questions that stump adults and leave them scrambling for an answer. Despite this, with the proper preparation each week, you should not feel overwhelmed when you teach your class, no matter what their ages are.

Preparation is key to teaching a good Sunday school lesson. If you were assigned a certain passage of scripture to share, then you will want to start your preparation session by reading it carefully.

If you were not assigned a specific topic, then you will want to pick the bible story or passage that you want to share with your class that week and then read it. After you have read it, you will want to carefully go through it and study what it says.

Write down what you observe, such as wording, details, how various people responded, and so forth. Then, come up with questions that will direct your class to notice these things as well when you are reading the Old Testament or the New Testament.

When you have come up with a list of questions, you will want to summarize what you read to yourself in a subject/complement manner. Do this over and over until you can do it smoothly and clearly.

By doing this, you will be able to solidify your understanding of the passage. In addition, there will probably come a point in the lesson where you will want to summarize what the class has learned.

This point is likely to come at the end, but you may want to summarize at the beginning before you study the bible story in greater depth so that your class knows what is coming as well. The next thing you will want to do is outline what you read.

This will help you keep your thoughts on task when you get nervous while you teach. It can also help you keep your thoughts more organized so that you can deliver them in a clear, connected, logical manner.

Then, fill out this outline with thoughts that you will want to incorporate into the lesson. For example, you may have a real life story that you will want to compare to the bible story.

Or you may have an object lesson that you will want to do to recapture the attention of your audience. As you do this you will want to develop the subject and complement further.

When you have completed the lesson outline, you will want to come up with a good conclusion and introduction. It is a good idea to try to come up with something attention grabbing at the beginning so that you can pull your class into the discussion.

At the same time, you may also want to end with something exciting, a summary of what you covered, or your testimony of the moral principles learned from the bible story. As you develop your lesson plan, you will want to decide on one big idea that you want to convey to the class.

This is particularly important when you are working with children as they have very short attention spans and they will need to hear the main point over and over throughout the class if they are going to remember it. Another thing that is very important to include is a discussion about how the story you are sharing can help each class member in everyday life.

If you do not have this discussion, many people will not see why what you are teaching is important. As a result, they will be less likely to pay attention or remember anything that you say.

If you want to make an impact in their lives for the better or if you want them to at least remember what you say, you will need to show them clearly how various things learned in the bible story can help them from day to day. Try to show that these morals apply to everyone in their personal lives by giving several examples of when these morals could help them make good decisions.

Another thing that you should do at the end of the lesson is try to get the class members to commit to trying out these morals during the week. If the lesson was on how Jesus loved everyone, then you may encourage a children's class to help their parents more during the week to show them that they love them.