Hello friends. We are the husband and wife writing team for Interlocked as well as Interlocked Children’s Edition. As Christians started using Interlocked, common questions we received were, “How can we teach this to our young children?”, “How can we equip our children with the biblical worldview?” and “How can we equip our children to stand firm in the faith in the face of all the different worldviews they encounter?”

The heartbeat of the adults and parents for the children in their lives was to share what they learnt from Interlocked with their little charges.

It was from this request that Interlocked Children’s Edition was developed for home teaching.

This children’s curriculum follows the exact narrative flow of Interlocked. This was done by design, so that any adult familiar with Interlocked would feel right at home teaching the children’s edition.

In order to keep in line with Interlocked, the children’s lessons do not follow typical conventions of a children’s curriculum. For example, in order to teach the same concepts to elementary-aged children, many of the lesson points of Interlocked had to be taught in an expanded way so that a child would understand. Each lesson (apart from the Overview) is broken into sections of varying lengths depending on the topic. This means the children’s lessons are not uniform in lesson length. Instead, our priority was to teach each topic as completely, clearly, carefully and slowly as possible, while catering to children of elementary school age.

Our hope and prayer is that adults and caregivers of elementary-aged children who still have approximately six to eight years at home would be able to use this series as “on-going biblical conversation and training” at home. We pray that this series will help increase conversations about God at home. Indeed, we pray it will help make conversations about God, His Word and His perspective on life matters, a core part of family life.

Depending on the different family dynamics and needs, adults can choose how many sections of a lesson they would like to teach at one sitting.

For example:

• One group may want to have a 20-minute session each time, as a daily bible time. So the adult might choose to teach just one section each time. This means it might take four sessions to finish one Interlocked Children’s Edition lesson.

• Another group might want to have a 40-minute session. This means each session will cover two or three sections. This would take about three sessions to finish a lesson.

• Yet another group has children who are able to have 1-hour Bible study sessions. In this case, each session can go through more sections of a lesson. This group might finish a lesson in two sessions.

In fact, week-on-week, the adults have the flexibility to vary this. They can decide how many sections to cover at each session and how long each session would be. On a typical week, they might do 40-minute sessions each weekend. Then during the school vacation time, they might choose have 1-hour sessions. During extra busy school weeks, they might attempt 20-minute sessions. It’s flexible.

This allows groups to make adjustments based on time restrictions and attention spans of the children.

Because the curriculum is designed for a home setting, it’s fine to take more time to go through the series.

While this approach is not conventional, we would like to extend the invitation to those who are keen to try it out at home.

If you are looking to use this series at Christian schools or Sunday schools, you are welcome to adapt the lessons to work for your specific situation.

One more point to note. This series is still a work in progress. The first module has been completed and is available now. For many families and groups, this first module would take approximately five to six months to complete (if taught as weekly lessons). Hence, we had decided to make the lessons available now. We will continue to post new lessons regularly as we complete them. If you have any questions or feedback, please contact us.

- Amos and Jen