A Review of Grapple Curriculum
Every so often I will be evaluating preteen curriculum on this blog. As I take time to personally evaluate preteen curriculum, I’ll be sharing my opinions with you. You may or may not agree with my thoughts and that is okay. But I do hope my insight is helpful, especially to those looking for honest feedback on available preteen lessons.
The first review is Group Publishing’s Grapple.
Strengths: Grapple is a cool name and sums up preteens’ faith development. They are ready to grapple with issues about God, life and relationships. The website idea is innovative. Great concept. If preteens frequently visit mygrapple.com, it can be a powerful tool to reach them beyond Sunday and connect outside of church. Graphics on the website and packaging are cool and relevant. Finally, a preteen curriculum that has cool graphics! Topics are really sweet too. Many who produce preteen lessons do a bad job of addressing issues that are important to preteens. Not Group Publishing. Each topic is age appropriate, Biblical and relevant.
Weaknesses: Many leaders I’ve talked to have difficulty getting preteens to interact with the website. Therefore, much of the curriculum’s effectiveness is lost. On the other hand, some who have been successful with getting preteens to interact with it. The video segments are not very good. Bad acting & low quality sound/editing equipment don’t enhance a preteen lesson. If video is going to be used, then it has to be done with excellence. Although the topics are great, the content of each preteen lesson doesn’t deliver. Group’s hands on philosophy of learning is effective. But Grapple’s content is mediocre and the format is choppy. Also, Grapple is difficult for larger churches to implement A church that has 50 plus preteens in a service would have to spend excessive amounts of time adapting it. In that case, why not develop your own preteen curriculum or purchase preteen lessons elsewhere?
There are lots of Grapple fans. I know you’re out there! There are also those who had high hopes, but ultimately chose another route for their preteen curriculum. Creating preteen lessons isn’t easy. I admire Group for launching Grapple and hope they continue to build on its strengths and learn from its weaknesses.
I want to hear your thoughts about Grapple. Leave a comment and let us know what you think.
Update – 9.6.12: Since I originally posted this blog in January 2010, PreteenMinistry.net has released a lot of preteen series. In fact, it has become a big part of what we do. Learn more about our preteen curriculum here. This post never was intended to slam the “competition” and promote our products. Not really a fan of those who do that. I simply gave my honest opinion about Grapple. In an effort to provide another alternative, we created our own preteen curriculum. I am sure you will find likes and dislikes in our preteen lessons as well. Maybe somebody will one day blog about the pros and cons of ours, who knows. But no resource is perfect. We’ve all got pros and cons. Just the way it goes.
5 Replies to “A Review of Grapple Curriculum”
COTN
Thanks for the read, I
David Warren
We use the Grapple preteen Curriculum at my church. It really only works in sunday school setting. If we were doing large group meetings, this would not be the curriculum I would use. We have not had a chance to do the website part of the curriculum. Hoping we can get it to work with our kids (crosses fingers). If it works, which I have heard it works for others, it’s such an effective tool to be able to reach into preteen’s lives durring the week and keep parents, kids, and teachers all connected together! Lessons are wonderful age appropiate and very flexible. Often times my teachers that have more time will develope a topic based on this weeks lesson, and teachers with less time have the ability to have alot of the leg work done for them. Running mulitple sunday schools, three services on sunday!, it takes alot of work to get something out and grapple fits in very nicely into our program. Well thats my two cents.
Alex Armstrong
I came into our preteen ministry halfway through the year and inherited the Grapple Curriculum; which has been rather interesting. I agree with both your strengths and your weaknesses especially regarding it not working well in a large church. Our leaders have repeatedly noted that the curriculum tends to be rather repetitive. They take on topic that you could spend on weekend on and try to spread it out over 4 weeks. Because of this they lose interest in studying for their lessons, they lose interest in trying to keep the running theme along and it just makes for a dull Bible Study hour.
We don’t use the online aspect simply because we are so divided in our ministry with kids who have parents who allow them, whenever, to be online and then kids’ whose parents who don’t allow them. Granted, many of our kids walk around with their iPhones and iTouch and do it anyways but thats a whole ‘notha discussion.
Curriculum is so hard to grasp with this age group because all of them are so diverse. Discussions are where we are heading towards simply because most preteens don’t tend to have an avenue to discuss really what they think…I want our ministry to be that avenue for them.
sharon
We used Grapple for a year with our 3-5th grade youth group, we thought the interactive piece would engage our kids when we were not together, to build a sense of community and further study. We found ourselves re-writing the lesson points, and even the games before meeting with the kids. It became too much, especially since the kids were not using the online piece at all. We encouraged them, their parents, and even gave out incentives to kids who went online in between our bi-monthly meetings. In June we stopped using Grapple and found pre-teen ministry. I am excited to use it and pray it will help us reach our kids this year.
Mom
I started working in the preteen ministry this summer and they use Grapple. We have a HUGE church with 60 preteens in our group in the first hour. It just doesn’t work-even though we break into small groups after the video. I agree that the topics are choppy and mediocre. Often, I can’t figure out how the scriptures relate to the topic. The activities are lame and my group won’t do them. Every week, I end up throwing the sheet that my church wasted money copying for me in the trash and just having discussion with my group.
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