Organizing Lessons with Curriculum Folders
As your lesson library grows, a flat list stops being useful. Curriculum folders give it structure — a single, simple level of colored folders, like a filing drawer, that you browse instead of scroll. "Preschool," "Elementary — Spring Quarter," "Youth: Romans." Open a folder and every lesson inside shows as a card you can size up at a glance.
Browsing the Library
Open Lessons from the admin sidebar. The library offers a folder view: a grid of curriculum folder tiles, each showing its name and how many lessons it holds, plus an Uncategorized tile that gathers any lesson not filed in a folder yet.
Open a folder and each lesson appears as a card with the details that help you choose:
- The age range / audience it's for (a colored chip).
- How many files are attached.
- How many times it's been taught ("taught 4 times").
Creating and Managing Folders
Folder management is available to admins with lesson edit permission.
- Create a folder — give it a name, an optional description, and a color so it's easy to spot.
- Rename or recolor — update a folder any time.
- Move a lesson into a folder — use the lesson's quick-move action from its card, or set the folder on the lesson's edit form. A lesson with no folder simply lives in Uncategorized.
- Delete a folder — only possible when it's empty. If a folder still holds lessons, TimelyChurch asks you to move or remove them first, so you can never accidentally orphan your lessons by deleting a folder out from under them.
One level, on purpose. Folders are deliberately a single level (no folders inside folders). One clear tier keeps the library fast to browse and impossible to get lost in.
The Lesson Page: About + Materials
Open any lesson and you get everything about it on one page — its scripture, objectives, supplies, and parent take-home fields — alongside its materials.
The best part is the inline preview: attached PDFs, images, and videos display right on the page. You can confirm you've got the right handout before class without downloading a stack of files to find out.
To add materials, you can upload a file, link to an external URL, or embed a resource. See Uploading Large Lesson Materials for how big files are handled.
Finding a Lesson Fast
Above the library, filters narrow things down at any scale:
- Curriculum (folder)
- Audience / age
- Category
- Status (draft, approved, archived)
- Tags
- Has attachments and taught / never taught
Search matches a lesson's title, description, or scripture reference.
Making the Categories Your Own
Folders organize your lessons; categories and audiences label them. Both are yours to shape under Lesson Settings (the gear icon on the Lessons page):
- Categories — rename, recolor, reorder, add your own, or deactivate ones you don't use.
- Audiences (age ranges) — define the age bands your ministry actually uses, each with a name, an emoji, a color, and an age range (for example, "Kids 0–11," "Youth 12–18").
These are what the lesson create and edit forms offer, so setting them up once makes every new lesson quicker to file.