Our Class Begins

Our church provides us with wonderful literature with which to teach our class. This year we even switched to an evangelistic edition of the text.  Jordan and I are not "teach by the book" teachers. We use the book; don't get me wrong, but we let the Church's liturgical and calendar year of saint feast days guide our lessons.

The beginning of our class establishes for our children that Jesus is our friend. Without that first knowledge that we can trust in Jesus, the rest of the year is in vain. We establish first and foremost that Jesus is a friend we can talk to day or night.  We also use this first lesson to establish that we are all friends and that as Catholics and Christians we can depend on each other at church, at home, and at school.

We spend the next several weeks establishing God as the creator of our world. We discuss how God created first the beautiful world we live in and then the people in it. Students begin to realize their own creation and the beauty of it. We establish up front that God created the people in this world to love him. Students today question why the world was created with all the ugliness in it. They doubt the existence of God in many cases. Schools teach all sorts of creation theories. We establish first and foremost that GOD is the creator and that He loves us, which is why we were all beautifully made.  We go on to explain temptation and original sin as it applies to Adam and Eve.

In our lessons we use stories from a children's bible, coloring pages and aids that come with our teacher material, such as worksheets for the class to complete. We incorporate songs and do short dramas, having the kids act out things we have studied. We create posters and complete color pages to enrich or introduce what we learn.

Perhaps that most significant method of teaching that we use is hands-on training. Once we have established God as the creator, we explain that God created things that are holy: the Bible, the rosary, the church itself. We take the students on a tour of the church and teach them the behaviors
and postures that are to be used during mass or when simply walking through the building.  We use the sign of the cross, and we genuflect. We visit the altar, the sanctuary lamp, the confessional, the stations of the cross. We visit with the Blessed Sacrament for a moment. We explain confession in a positive light, showing that the confessional is nothing to be afraid of and that the Priest is there to be our friend, as Jesus is our friend.  We take the mystery out of the church and open the students' eyes to what is going on when they enter the church.

During this first unit, the class is introduced to angels as spirits that God has created. We discuss the important jobs of the angels in history and talk about some of the most famous of the angels during our Archangel Feast Day lesson. We teach the Guardian Angel prayer as a prayer children can say when they are scared or lonely.

We wrap up the unit learning about different types of prayer and how Jesus taught us to pray the   Our Father. This becomes the first major prayer that the children learn in the year. We open class with it every week, and after this point, we begin calling on children to open us up with the prayer that Jesus taught us.