favorite lessons

It’s been a fun trip down memory lane this summer as I’ve recounted and shared ten of my favorite lessons from my experiences of teaching fourth, sixth, and eighth grade religious education over the last decade. Last but not least is a lesson I did several years in a row when teaching eighth grade; it is actually a string of lessons on Church history. This lesson was pretty labor-intensive, involving a PowerPoint presentation that I put […]

Faith formation is not just about giving intellectual assent to a set of principles and doctrines. It is about placing trust in a relationship. Many of the sessions I have done with young people over the years have focused on the notion of trust—an issue that young people are grappling with as they discern who it is in this world that they can rely on. Scripture, of course, tells us that God can be trusted, […]

When I was a student teacher back in the day, my cooperating teacher taught me that the goal of an effective teacher is to turn the spotlight away from yourself and onto your students. He emphasized that they were here to perform for you, not you for them! I’ve tried to follow that advice as much as possible as a catechist by creating activities that engage the young people in activities rather than having them […]

It’s no secret that I love music! Over the years in my books and here on my blog, I have advocated for integrating music into catechesis in a variety of ways. This brings me to one of my favorite lessons: The Psalms: We Can Talk to God Under ANY Circumstances. Research tells us that young people (junior high and high school) listen to an average of 3.5 hours of music each day. Music is certainly […]

One of the things that I enjoyed most about teaching sixth grade with a focus on the Old Testament, was using Old Testament themes to help the kids understand concepts of our Catholic faith. One particularly successful example was a lesson I did about the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist, drawing from the Old Testament example of the Jewish people recognizing the Temple as the locus of God’s presence in their midst. I began […]

As I look back on my favorite lessons, this one really stands out because I love the idea of magic. I think, deep down, I always wanted to be a magician, but I was never any good at it! In this lesson for sixth graders, we were looking at the story of Creation, in which God creates all of creation out of nothing. The first thing I thought of was how magicians try to convince […]

We continue our series of looking at some of my favorite lessons from the archives here at Catechist’s Journey. Today, we re-visit one of my favorite lessons from my sixth-grade catechist days. Sixth grade typically teaches the Catholic faith through the lens of the Old Testament. As I prepared to teach Chapter 16 of Finding God Grade 6, “Prophets Challenge,” I tried to think of people in the lives of my sixth graders who challenge them […]