Lesson Building

For the past few weeks this has been my dining room table. Piles of books and papers. Several mugs of coffee constant distractions and general disorganization. I do not have a designated work space in our home I have to carve out a spot on the dining room table. I try to set up 2 mornings a week where I can devote a few hours to creating religious education lessons. What I have learned from the past year is that we need to have focus for the children. This has been our weakness. I am a proponent of organic learning where you are led as you go. I see how that can be disconnected especially when you should be emphasizing a certain topic. This year we have a first year Confirmation prep student so we will need to take a more organized approach to our typical non sequitur schoolhouse.*

Many of these books are from our own personal collection. I ended up buying a few Confirmation prep textbooks. I’m not sure how I feel about a few of them, its so hard to make good choices online. After skimming through a few of them I think that I will likely use one over the others. I’m still deciding. I won’t know for certain for another month. In reality Keith is likely taking on the Confirmation prep for our children. This is his area of focus as he was teaching these ages before we took a break from classroom teaching. I will be joining in as a supporting assistant.

As I was saying… What I have learned from the past year is that we need to have focus for the children. One where they can see it too. One where they can do some self directed learning from our assignments.

In the chaos is a plan. The plan is a board and notebook.

The board is where we want to base our weekly lessons. I say weekly loosely as we are not going to be regimental here. We live in this world of chaos and sometimes things are delayed. We have intention to be on a week by week basis of lessons. The Notebook was thought originally as being supportive in the classroom for Family Faith Formation. Almost a month in I see it would be a distraction so they will remain at home to reinforce the FFF lessons. Our desire to go down rabbit holes is going to be put to good use in the notebook. We will give you a glimpse of these once it has been set up. There are a few details that need to be sorted out yet.

* I want to be honest about the educating of our children. Currently have not and do not officially homeschool our children. Four of the five have a public school experience. They are homeschooled in additional disciplines based on our whims or observation of a need to fill in gaps of knowledge. Geography, history, philosophy/ancient politics, and geo-politics are our most significant additions. These lessons happen at the dinner table each night. I share this because it is important to note that educating your children can happen in many ways. We highly recommend that you can choose to supplement their education by offering mini-lessons at home in disciplines that are important to you. Music, art, history….so many options. Simply talking about a topic over a meal does wonders for your children. Our eldest two frequently share anecdotes about how peers wonder why they know about such broad topics. It was dinner as a family where these learning moments happened.