Christian Formation
St. Mary's offers church school on Sundays from 9:45 to 10:50 a.m. for children from preschool through grade 5. We believe in giving our children a strong foundation in the Christian life.
Children in our church school have fun while learning about God and Scripture. Our program uses a “rotation” model that gives children a new perspective on a lesson each week. We have found that this rotation model is an amazing way to teach and engage our children. Each school year we have a total of 5 Rotation sessions.
Our students are assigned to a class according to their age. They study a topic or scripture lesson for five weeks, and then wrap up the session with ‘Chapel’ held on the sixth week. Each week they travel to a different workshop and see the lesson from five different perspectives. The workshops are flexible and are developed specifically for each five-week rotation. They nearly always include a story-telling workshop, an art workshop, a video workshop, a game or drama workshop—all designed to enhance the lesson. This gives us lots of opportunities to be very creative with the material our children study, and the adults who work with this program have as much fun as the children. For Chapel, we bring all our children together in our newly renovated Chapel that is in our Church School wing. We review all that was just learned in the five week program; usually we play a game (such as Jeopardy), read stories, or have some type of art activity.
We develop our own curriculum. We have a special committee that meets prior to each rotation to develop teaching points and ways of presenting the points in different workshops. This model enables us to tap into the talents of many adults within the parish since workshop leaders serve for five weeks only, and we match our leaders to workshops that showcase their skills or areas of expertise. For example, in the past we have had woodworking workshops, cooking workshops, piñatas (the Golden Calf), liturgical dance and a hand bell workshop.
Our classrooms are all designed to enhance our workshops. Our "Sabbath Cinema" has real movie seats, a big screen T.V., tube lights around the baseboards. Our story/drama room is decorated like a room in the Temple at Jerusalem. Our game room is decorated like a Bedouin tent (with an almost life-sized Gary the Camel painted on one wall). Other rooms are also decorated.
Students meet at 9:45 a.m. and are taken to their particular workshop by shepherds (whose job it is to guide our children to the right place). Once class is finished for the morning, children are led back to join the adults for Eucharist.
The spiritual nurture and support of our children is a high priority at St. Mary's. We take our baptismal covenant seriously and know that we are responsible for supporting parents in this area. We'd love to have you and your children join us.
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