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Intermediate Grades

“I Pray for Malala”

During our prayer the other night, as the young people were offering intercessions, one young lady said, “I pray for Malala, the girl from Pakistan, who is speaking out about peoples’ rights.” After the prayer, I acknowledged this intercession and said how impressed I was that she had mentioned Malala Yousafzai and began to explain her story to the class in case some were not familiar with her. She is an education activist who was shot […]

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Intermediate Grades

The Serpent and Temptation – “He Kept Coming at Her”

Perhaps the most interesting part of our session last evening, as we explored the consequences of not trusting in God (via the story of Adam and Eve) was when one young lady pointed out that the serpent “never gave up” but kept coming at Eve until she gave in. What a great insight! We picked up on that right away and talked about how that happens to kids with peer pressure: we might say no […]

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Intermediate Grades

Session 6: October 22, 2013 – When We Don’t Trust God, We Face Consequences (Adam & Eve; Cain & Abel)

Here is my plan for this evening’s session. I will have 60 minutes to teach before we take the kids to church for the Rosary in honor of the Month of the Holy Rosary. Big Idea: When We Stop Trusting God, We Face Consequences (Adam and Eve; Cain & Abel) Preliminaries: (15 mins)  As students enter, have them work immediately on coloring their Creation Drawings from last week. Allow 10 mins total and then share and collect. Opening […]

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Intermediate Grades

Summary of 10/15/13 Session: God Creates Something Good Out of Nothing

Yesterday, I gave a couple of little tidbits (Ave Maria activity and a humorous comment from a student) about this past Tuesday’s session so now I thought I’d give a more detailed summary. For the first time, I had a couple of absentees so I was down to 7 students. As soon as students entered, I put them to work locating passages in the Bible using their Bible Bookmarks from my book The Bible Blueprint and a Scripture Search […]

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Intermediate Grades

Ave Maria – A Little Lesson in Latin

To begin yesterday’s session, we did a little review of the Rosary and then I introduced them to the Ave Maria and did a little activity with them to translate the Latin into English (check out my previous post with details on this Ave Maria activity). Here are a couple of pics of the kids matching English lines with the Latin lines while we are watching/listening to a performance of the Ave Maria by The […]

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Intermediate Grades

“My Dad’s Gonna Get Suspicious”

At last evening’s session, we focused on the gift of God’s creation and spent a lot of time learning about and reflecting on the goodness of God’s creation. As class was winding down, I encouraged the young people to look up at the night sky when they left to see the stars and the moon and to look around at all the people made in God’s image and to be grateful and joyful. One of […]

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Intermediate Grades

Session 5: God Creates Something Good out of Nothing

Tonight, we are going to focus on the gift of God’s creation as presented in Genesis, chapter 1. Here is my plan. Big Idea: God Creates Something Good Out of Nothing Preliminaries: (25 mins) As students enter, have them work immediately on a Scripture search worksheet, using their Bibles and their Bible bookmarks from The Bible Blueprint. Allow 10 minutes total and then review. Invite a volunteer to review how to pray the Rosary. Do “Ave […]

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Intermediate Grades

Reviewing with the Bible Bookmarks

As the kids enter the room tomorrow evening, I will have them immediately get to work finding some Scripture passages using the Bible Bookmarks (from my book The Bible Blueprint) and their bibles along with the following worksheet which you can feel free to use. Take note that page numbers are different for every edition which is why I cannot provide an answer key. Likewise, this activity will only work if all of the children are […]

Intermediate Grades

Reviewing the Rosary – Ave Maria

At the beginning of class tomorrow, I’ll ask for a volunteer to step forward and to demonstrate how to pray the Rosary based on our experience from last week. I’m also going to do the following activity with them to introduce them to Schubert’s beautiful version of the Ave Maria and to expose them to a little bit of Latin, which is part of our heritage as Catholics. I will have the words of the […]

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Intermediate Grades

I’m Out of Breath! Summary of 10/8/13 Session

Wow! Did we accomplish a lot last night! I’m still out of breath just thinking about how the evening went because we really packed in a lot and finished just under the wire! Here’s a summary of the highlights and lowlights: The kids are doing a nice job on their homework assignments. Last night, 7 of 9 returned with their parents’ signature. 6 completed the assignment in its entirety (including one child with no parent […]