Category Archives: Children’s Music Programs

Children’s Choirs are an important part of children’s ministry. Children’s choirs and musical programs are an effective tool to:

• Teach children to worship through music.
• Teach children to minister in front of a congregation.
• Make the congregation aware of children’s ministry.
• Get unchurched parents and relatives to come to church. (They’ll come to see their children perform.)

Even though children’s choirs are effective tools in children’s ministry, most choir resources consist only of music programs. There is very little out there instruct children’s pastors on how to get a children’s choir started. Here’s a few guidelines.

Decide who will be in the choir. If you’re a small church, you may want to include every child. A larger church might want to limit it to those who sign up for practices or even hold auditions. There’s no right or wrong way of doing this. Decide which works best for you.

Age Groups: Decide what age groups will be in your choir. Will you have different choirs for each age group? Preschool children’s choir and grade school choirs should always be separated. Aside from that, decide what’s best for your children’s ministry.

Choir Director: If you’re in a small church and short on help, you may need to double up duties and be the choir director as well as the children’s pastor. The ideal would be to have somebody who knows music and loves children. The music director at your church would be a good resource to find the perfect choir director.

Practice Schedule: If you include all of the children in your children’s ministry, the last half hour of church or mid-week classes might be an ideal practice time. If not, one evening a week or Sunday nights might be a good time to schedule practices. Be consistent.

Rules: Decide what rules you will have for your choir. Some choirs have a policy of a certain number of practices you can miss. All choirs should have a set guideline for behavior and consequences for misbehavior.

Choose Music: What music you choose will depend on a number of factors. Consider the ages of your choir, the length and frequency of practices, and how in depth you want to get into music theory before deciding what music to use.

Choreography: You may want to include sign language and motions into the music your children’s choir sings. Simpler songs are better suited for this. In either case, you will want to work with the children on how they enter, exit, and stand during performances.

Plan Practices: If you have short practices, you may only want to go over the songs you’ll be singing. If you have longer practices, you can spend time teaching music, playing games, and learning about worship. The important thing is to plan your practices ahead of time.

Pam Andrews of Brentwood Music has the best resources for teaching a children’s choir. Here’s a resource that is very good.

Children’s Choir Basics

By Pam Andrews

Lillenas Music

Training DVD

Click here to order.

Learn the basics of teaching and developing the children’s choir. Discover why you should set musical, spiritual and even personal goals. You will even learn how you can make performing musicals more fun for everyone! This is a must-have for any children’s music worker’s resource library.

Pam Andrews has taught elementary school music, pre-school choirs, children’s choirs, and is a gifted and highly-successful children’s Christian songwriter. Pam is best known for her curriculum developmental ideas found in the numerous teacher resource books she has written, and is the creator of many best-selling children’s choir musicals.