Dear Friends in Christ,
Over the summer we have been thinking deeply about our role as catechists. Asking ourselves: Where do we want to grow in our vocation of parenting and teaching the faith? While we had considered return to the classroom setting this year we decided against it. Our interest still remains. Our calling is still quite present. It has been a season of intention for us. Having children spanning in ages from young adult to toddler makes for an interesting work life balance. Specifically as we have learned our parenting needs have grown more than anticipated. Helping young adult children navigate this world is far more involved than we were led to believe. Oh these days we thought would be easy! In ways they are yet there are things that occur that require big helping hands. This is where we are being a reliable safety net for our adult children while still managing the usual household expectations with young children.
I mentioned intentional as a season. We have chosen to be more intentional with our time and energy. Especially as it pertains to the emphasis we want to use our time and talents. Keith has very much been writing about topics. He has been formulating some clever ideas that can be best described as phenomenal. We continue to collaborate weekly making notes of our brainstorming inspiration.
Let me back up a bit for those who have not followed us long. We decided to step away from teaching in the classroom in 2021 because our son was born in 2020. We thought just a short break would be good for us to be more present at home. Now that baby is an exceedingly active toddler boy that really does take far more of my attention than I would like to admit. Long days with little time for extras we had to be intentional with our time to the family. Last year we enrolled our children in the 2022-23 catechism program at our parish. Continuing the new format where the parents attend class with their children: Family Faith Formation.
The first and last weeks of the month are taught in group form (think one room school house ages together) with a Leader and the mini-lesson activities are taught by the parents. The second week of the month is reserved for the sacramental children. Only those families with sacramental-prep children attend in class and the others remain home to teach an assigned lesson. The third week was reserved for the children being taught in class by the Leader while the parents attend a lecture/discussion on challenging topics relevant to raising Catholic children. The topics for adults varied from social media safety, importance of marriage, teaching skills, and book suggestions.
We had full intent of weekly posting summarizing our lessons as we taught them to our children. Many are still in draft form cobbled together from crazy scribbles on paper. We will release a few here and there focusing on the lessons that we feel will be helpful resources. I will make a note in each post with the original date of the topic. Some of those individual sessions may be broken up into multiple lessons. For example we had many sessions in the 2021-22 year that covered multiple parables each time. When it comes to parables those are great options to build individual lessons around. I have completed a few and they can be found here: Treasure and Fine Pearls, Fig Tree Lesson, and Through the Eye of the Needle.
Currently I am sorting out the lessons from last year’s program thinking about how we would want to present them to students. (Note: this is very back burner as we are going to look to being more in line with the current year’s program. I cannot say for certain when these topics from 2022-23 will be published.) Last year’s Family Faith Formation 2022-23 was about Salvation History by traveling through the Bible learning about how all of the stories point toward the coming of Our Lord. The first 2 classroom sessions have begun as many programs do with Creation, The First Sin, The First Murder, Covenants, and Noah’s Ark. Keith and I thoroughly brainstormed Noah’s Ark. Keith led the way on this lesson going deeper, getting past the typical “floating zoo” focus that is so often associated with Noah. He began to go further into the significance of Noah’s Two Birds. In that post we both wrote portions that were interwoven into a more detailed discussion. This particular focus is for older students.
You can find that post here: Listening to the Raven and Dove.
As for this year we are enrolled in the same Family Faith Formation program. We will post with the same intent picking the topics that have inspired us to approach it differently. The 2023-24 Family Faith Formation year is focusing on The Apostles Creed. We expect to add in more sacramental prep this year as we have a first year Confirmation sacramental student who intends to receive Confirmation in 2025.
This is where we are in our journey.
Pax Vobiscum,
Yvonne & Keith
The Small Pencil Catechist 