I’ve recently started teaching catechism to two young girls, aged 10 and 12. It’s a unique situation where they are new to the Catholic faith and are beginners. They don’t fit into the older group of kids their age since they’re just starting out, but they are too old for the younger kids.
So I’ve been tasked with the challenge of teaching them Catholicism under a different format than the regular catechism. Not an impossible task, but I’ve never taught other people’s children before and I’ve certainly never come up with lessons plans.
The first step I took was starting with this catechism book my mom gave me. I’m sure there are updated ones but I really like the format of The New Saint Joseph Baltimore Catechism.
It seems simple enough for these girls to understand and has illustrations and questions to ask. The only problem with starting here is that their level of understanding is pretty elementary.
I have to take a step back for a while and review some basic truths about God, creation, and the Catholic church. So I can’t quite follow this book just yet, though I plan to go back to it.
I am also struggling with no real terms of what they should learn at this point. So I plan on teaching basic prayers, which you can find in either this pink prayer book or blue prayer book, each with 18 traditional prayers. There’s a brown free version if you sign up for the newsletter, or you can purchase the pink or blue.
We are starting with the sign of the cross, Our Father, Hail Mary and Glory Be for each lesson. Last week’s lesson plan was on God’s creation. As I said, they are a little older so I was trying to find activities that fit their age group.
I came up with this Story of Creation Canva Presentation that you can download as a Canva template. You can also download the Story of Creation PDF. Feel free to update it to your liking. There’s also a video about creation at the end. I liked this video because it gave a great explanation without being too long, though there were a few commercials in it.
I also created these Story of Creation Flash Cards to go with this lesson plan. I mixed them up and had the girls try to put them in the correct order, which they did!
The next activities were a couple of word searches just to review the terms they just learned. The final activity was this creation bracelet activity from TrueWay Kids. This was a really big hit, but I don’t see how you can go wrong with bracelets and young girls.
TrueWay Kids has free creation lessons for different age groups and they have packages with activities and games. This one was from the 5-10 age group but you can get them from babies to teens.
I purchased this Jewelry Center Kit from Walmart, as well as some additional beads, but if I had a little more time I probably would have bought some charms shaped like the sun, moon, stars and animals. But everything is moving fast with this program so I ran out of time.
Overall, it was a pretty good lesson and the girls seemed engaged. Definitely throwing in crafts makes a big difference in their level of interest. So it looks like I’d better start working on a new craft room at home lol.
This Sunday was family Catechesis, which we do once a month. The focus of this week is the ACTS Prayer Method, which I will explain in the next blog post. Again, lots of activities to keep the kids focused, which seems to be the key to teaching kids.
As we move through these weekly lessons I would like to share everything I’ve made or found online. I know there are lots of great resources online that have helped me tremendously.
What’s your favorite resource for finding great learning material? My daughter, who’s a high school math teacher, suggested Teachers Pay Teachers, so I’m going to check them out too.
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