Religious Education
Friends General Conference makes available resources for children's religious education.
Resources for Children
Sparklers (1982) is back as Sparkling Still. updated and re-imagined! You will find everything you need to create lessons for children ages 3 to 8 and build a classroom community.
Children have the same need as adults for communion with God, Love, Joy, the Source. Children live from a place of connection--young children don't have boundaries between time for work, time for play, and time to be connected with the Divine. For them, work, play, and worship is all the same thing. This 9-page resource examines how worship can be integrated into the life of a classroom.
QuakerBooks of Friends General Conference carries a number of children’s story Bibles. None of them pretend to be Bibles, per se. Rather, they are severely edited retellings in language appropriate for children. They are quite different, and appropriate for different age levels.
The problem of sporadic attendance in First Day School is common to large and small meetings. The number of school, sports, and enrichment activities available to children has expanded leaving them exhausted or otherwise engaged on Sunday mornings.
Many years ago in Africa, storytellers traveled from village to village sharing myths, gossip, and lessons with the people. Together, they laughed and cried and shared their bond of humanity. Then television came to the region. The television started telling the same stories as the tellers.
Middle school and high school Friends represent two entirely different groups in terms of developmental needs. The former (roughly grades 6th through 8th) are young adolescents entering a stage of rapid and volatile growth driven by raging hormones.
In 1989 we began a new retreat program called Junior Yearly Meeting Elementary Retreats under the care of New England Yearly Meeting (NEYM) for children in grades two through six.
Multiple Friends have expressed concerns in recent years about how many children and young people seem to have trouble making the transition from Young Friend (in First Day School) to Adult Friend (in meeting for worship, committee work, etc. ).
My “Friendly” outlook in writing this article is to look at the concept of multiple intelligences through the eyes of a Quaker and to consider possible applications in a First Day School setting.
A growing tension exists between our Quaker families and our culture of busyness and ‘round the clock scheduling. Caught between school sports and all of other choices that now exist on Sunday mornings, Quaker families often don’t prioritize meeting attendance.
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