Dear Friends in Christ,
Last year you may remember that I filled in for a few catechists and ended up being a substitute for the FFF program at my parish. As a substitute everything was compatible with my time and I was enjoying the feeling of being in a classroom again. God must have heard this in my heart and sent another choice for me. It turns out that my presence was desperately needed for another class as it unexpectedly lost its catechist due to conflicts. In late October I took on the lead catechist role for the second year communion prep for the OCIC class. That class was similar to the classes I used to teach before 2020. It ended up being a great teaching year and the families reminded me of what I truly loved about teaching.
For this year I am officially a catechist for the program. We have 2 children in the first sacramental year of the Family Faith Formation program. As of this month I am officially back in the classroom. I will teach my youngest’s First Year Holy Communion class. In addition I will continue substituting as the need exists. I do believe after our youngest two complete their sacraments in 2028 I can see myself going back to the OCIC program.
Keith will not be teaching. He is still working on his brainstorm ideas, planning family pilgrimage trips, and helping me with good ideas for lessons. I am not certain when he will return, or if he will return to the classroom. He has been spending his time writing and building curriculum that may someday find its way to this website.
Last year I had grand plans to share some of the lessons I supplemented for my OCIC class. I have a few written in a scribbled mess. I suspect many are very much going to be similar to our 2020-21 year that can be found in the older posts. When will I get to publishing? Who knows? I do hope to find the time, the consistent time, to write and publish.
I will continue on with a Virtues class for girls in the parish Homeschool Program, The Little Women Hospitality Program for this school year. We will be working on year two of this program. What I know is that I am using most of my time writing supplemental lessons for part two of the Little Women Hospitality Program. That program is designed to be taught in a home using equipment found in a house with a class time being 2-4 hours in duration. We are teaching in a parish classroom in a 90 minute session. This has required a significant amendment to the lesson plan and creative solutions to using equipment not found in a church. Last school year we were able to provide a rich experience for the students that fulfilled the original author’s plan. It was quite the challenge at times but was a wonderful year.
This is where we are in the journey. Glad you are here.
Pax Vobiscum,
Yvonne & Keith
General Note about our website: The default plan is to release supplemental lessons based on the sessions we feel will be helpful resources. I will make a note in each post with the original date of the topic. Any and all will be published after the date, many months later, but will be published in relation to the year they occurred. A revisionist history it is not. This backdate publishing is with intent to help us keep track of when this lesson was originally taught. As a point, much of what we wrote did occur in that precise moment, we are only getting to the editing months later.
Author’s note: 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 little 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. We enrolled our children in the catechism program at our parish. Continuing the new format where the parents attend class with their children: Family Faith Formation. If you are not familiar with this type of catechesis our parish sets the program up based on a particular focus for each week of the month. 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 parent classes are very much like continuing education. Topics for adults vary from social media safety, importance of marriage, teaching skills, deeper catechism, and book suggestions.
The Small Pencil Catechist 