Oral Tradition

Introduction

This year in the 2023-2024 Family Faith Formation we will study the Apostles Creed. In conjunction with the in person classes our family attends at our Parish we will be creating supplemental lessons for our children. This year we have a first year Conformation student and a non-sacramental grade school student (fourth grade level) as well as a pre-school aged child. These lessons are going to be driven by our older child’s formation as we are focusing on this sacramental process.

How are we implementing these lessons? After attending three weeks of sessions we have decided on a notebook for the two older children. The youngest is going to be participating limitedly. He attends the FFF in person classes with us each week and spends much of his time coloring and other age appropriate crafts. If I come across something helpful for the pre-k ages I will include that here, otherwise his age level is along for the ride.

I found that the easiest way to teach the supplemental material is through the use of a notebook. We have two 1-subject notebooks we are using for each student. This is simple and keeps everything in one place. I hand write out the lessons and add any extras by glueing it to the pages. We attend the class Tuesday I take notes of what we learned in class then Wednesday morning I come up with the supplemental material.

What is supplemental? It can be a simple as going a little deeper into scripture and or People of the Bible or down a rabbit hole of fascination. The rabbit hole is where the creativity of the lesson is going to go and can be just about anything within the Catholic Tradition but it will relate in some way to the FFF lesson. We like rabbit holes. This is how we teach our children how to value and cultivate the gift of human curiosity. While many of these may seem a bit like digressions we will show you how they can be brought in to the lesson. I will also mention that we may pull in some ideas from our own kids’ questions.

About the title: Oral Tradition This is from Keith’s outline of the year and his overall theme of prayer being a significant oral tradition within the Church. He will touch on it in the portions he will be developing. We are using a Bulletin Board to visually highlight the focus for the week. You can find more about how we set up our Bulletin Board in our post here.