Series of entries in my teaching diary about an experimental Sunday school class. First entry.
Susie, Lee, Melissa, and I met this morning to plan out the next few months of our Sunday school class. We have just about finished up the fall quarter, when we have been focused on Unitarian Universalist identity, and we’re about to move into the winter quarter, when we will focus on our Jewish and Christian heritage. (And Melissa and Susie have promised that they would write up a short description of last week’s class, which I couldn’t attend since I was preaching.)
We decided that we will have to try to finish up our UU identity quilt this Sunday, the last Sunday in the fall quarter. Then we talked about the winter quarter. I suggested that we spend the weeks in December talking about the Christmas story, relating it to other miracle birth stories (the birth of Buddha, etc.). We all agreed that we like our current method of telling stories about people — it seems to work well with our wide age span — although Melissa is pushing us to bring in more of the Unitarian Universalist seven principles. So we chose two Bible characters we wanted to present. Melissa said she would like to do a unit on Esther, and Susie suggested we do a unit on David (of David-and-Goliath fame).
We had all noticed that four children who had been attending regularly had not been to Sunday school in two or three weeks — Perry, Monty, Heather and Sara. So each of us hand-wrote a note to one of the four saying that we hoped the child would return to Sunday school, and we each signed all of the notes.
We also talked about what had been going on in class, especially this past Sunday (we had to explain to Melissa what had happened while playing Red Light Green Light). We talked about the children — how much we enjoy Monty and Perry swapping nametags to confuse us, interactions between siblings, the newcomers who started with our class then moved to the earlier session of Sunday school, etc. And we seemed to talk quite a bit about our own lives, too — jobs, and families, and so on. I find that I really enjoy working with this teaching team, and I enjoy just spending time with them — Sunday school is not just about the kids, it’s also about the friendships that develop between the teachers.