Week 2 went very nicely last evening. Here are some of the highlights: We met in church for an opening prayer service with the pastor. The kids were well-behaved and participated nicely. The pastor did a very nice job of encouraging the kids to put Jesus first in their lives. That took about a half-hour of the 75-minute class time. Two of the boys in my group asked if they could call me “Dr. Pepper” […]
For this evening’s class, I plan to focus on the Ten Commandments. One of the things that the Confirmation assessment revealed is that many of the young people in my group do not know the Commandments well at all. Here’s my plan: Two Sides to Every Coin – I’ll begin by flipping a coin several times, asking different young people to call out “heads” or “tails.” I’ll use this to illustrate that, just as every coin […]
I’m going to be tied up over the next few days so I thought I would use today to share what I’ll be teaching this coming Monday. We have the third of our Confirmation Intensives. For this one, we are going to focus on the number SEVEN. Actually 7 x 3. What do I mean by that? We will have the young people participate in 3 sessions that evening, focusing on the following: the 7 […]
I’m always suspicious of people who tell me that when they were in Vegas, they won X amount of money playing a certain game or machine. They never tell you how much they lost along the way! In the same way, I’m about to tell you about a moment I had last night at religious education that was like hitting the jackpot. I’ll follow that, however, with a little disclaimer that shows it wasn’t all […]
For this evening’s Confirmation Intensive, my segment is to do a meditation on the Corporal Works of Mercy. Remember, our Confirmation Intensives are two hours long and aside from an opening and closing segment in their “homeroom,” the young people move about to fout different 20-minute mini sessions. My segment takes place in the chapel. This evening we are focusing on what Catholics BELIEVE and DO. Two of the mini sessions will be on the […]
Last night’s Confirmation Intensive, a 2-hour session with the 8th graders, was a resounding success! The kids were not surprisingly curious and anxious about what they were going to do for “2 WHOLE HOURS!!!” We had them on the move for the whole 2 hours and they were delightfully engaged in their mini-sessions (20 minutes with each of the 4 eighth grade catechists. For my sessions, we met in my room in the school and […]
I hope you had a great Thanksgiving weekend! Mine was very nice…relaxing and enjoyable. Waking up early this morning to go back to work was not easy! Tonight is our 4th session on Church history. I came up with another activity that reinforces the Church history timeline powerpoint that I used the 1st two weeks of the unit. Here’s the scoop: I printed out the “slides” from the Powerpoint (37 in all) and fixed each […]
Here’s my plan for this evening’s session: We will complete the church history Powerpoint that we began last week (we have 2 more time periods to go through). Throughout the Powerpoint, the young people have been filling in a note-taking sheet with pertinent names and dates. When we are finished, we’ll review the info on the note-taking sheets and then I’ll arrange them into 5 small groups (2 or 3 in each group) and assign […]
For my session tonight, I’m bringing in the one and only trophy I ever won in my life: a 2nd place trophy for floor hockey, earned when I was in junior high. My brother John and I ventured over to the Boys’ Club in our neighborhood and joined a team there and went all the way to the finals, coming up just a little bit short. The little 10-inch trophy stands proudly in my basement […]
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