Lesson Plan: A Parent Workshop

Student Jim Collins developed a 3 hour workshop for parents that helped them learn to evaluate children’s books and see how they can be tools for faith conversations with their children.  Books used in this workshop include:

How Full is Your Bucket? (Tom Rath and Mary Reckmeyer)

Pete’s Angel (Hunter Darden)

A Visitor for Bear (Bonnie Becker)

The Three Questions (Jon J. Muth)

The Empty Pot (Demi)

God’s Dream (Desmond Tutu)

Download the workshop plan here.

Lesson Plans: Practicing Christianity with Children, Sessions 6 & 7

Union-PSCE will be closed tomorrow, Good Friday, and we are therefore posting the final two sessions in this series of lessons today.  Session 6 helps parents consider how to practice worship with children and session 7 demonstrates possibilities for Bible study with children.  A number of different children’s books are used in each of these sessions with parents.

We will post again beginning Monday, April 5.  May you all have a blessed and joyous Easter.

Lesson Plans: Practicing Christianity with Children, Session 5

Healing is the focus of this session in the Practicing Christianity with Children series by Kim Lee.  Miss Tizzy and Wilfrid Gordon McDonald Partridge, as well as art works, help parents experience how to help their children explore this aspect of Christian life.

Download session 5 here.

Lesson Plans: Practicing Christianity with Children – Session 4

The practice of prayer is central to the life of faith of most Christians.  Using a variety of children’s books, parents begin to explore their understanding of prayer and how to help their children develop their own understanding and practice of prayer.

Download session 4 here.

Lesson Plans: Practicing Christianity with Children, Session 3

This lesson, third in a series of seven about teaching Christian practices to children, focuses on the psychosocial development of children.   Designed to use with parents, this session (and the one on March 26, 2010) sets the context of children and Christian practices in a broader understanding of how children learn and how they experience the world around them.

Download the third session from this link.

Lesson Plans: Practicing Christianity with Children, Session 2

An understanding of how children think and learn can be helpful in exploring how to engage them in Christian practices such as prayer, worship, Bible study and healing.  Today’s session, the second of seven, focuses on children’s cognitive development, utilizing the work of Piaget and Vygotsky.

Download session two here.

Lesson Plans: Practicing Christianity with Children

For the next several days, we will be posting a series of lessons written for parents of preschool and elementary children at the South Mecklenburg Presbyterian Church in Charlotte, NC.  These seven sessions reflect  on the Reformed understanding of infant baptism and its implications for Christian parenting, explore the cognitive, social and emotional development of young children, and apply those understandings to the practices of prayer, healing, worship and Bible study.

Kim Lee, Union-PSCE at Charlotte MACE student and Director of Children’s Ministry at SMPC, wrote these lessons for her specific setting, so there may be elements of the session that would need to be adapted for your particular audience and setting.

The sessions on specific Christian practices use children’s books to help adults engage in the topic.  The first session, posted here, sets the whole concept of teaching children Christian practices in the context of the vows taken on their behalf in baptism and utilizes Walter Wangerin’s Water,  Come Down!

Miss Fannie and the Widow: A Stewardship Lesson for Adults

On February 26, Union-PSCE student Marcia Rauch reviewed Jan Karon’s Miss Fannie’s Hat. Today, she expands on her review by making that book (and Luke’s story of the widow who gave all she had) the centerpiece of a session for adults about stewardship.  As Marcia says, “Stewardship is a vital part of our lives as members of a Christian community.  Too often the time of the church year that is designated for the annual “stewardship campaign” becomes a time of sermons and minutes for mission that can sometimes be very similar from year to year. The congregation expects this campaign and can thus miss the real message of what it means to give back to God. Miss Fannie’s Hat is a beautiful story that brings the message of stewardship to us in a fresh way.”

Click here to download the complete lesson plan.