Shujālpur There are some exciting changes coming to our RE program beginning this March.
Mill Park First, in an effort to increase attendance, younger RE (through second grade) will go back to meeting during services. Much younger kids should mostly be in the kind hands of Ms Mariah from 9:45 a.m. – 11:15 a.m. to enjoy songs, stories and educational play while you attend services. Older kids up to second grade will be upstairs through ‘Message For All Ages’, after which all kids 2nd grade and younger will be sung out and go downstairs for their RE Program which will be in the in the combined Nursery and younger RE rooms. Parents with kids who they feel will have problems downstairs may stay upstairs, but we encourage you to try out our downstairs program for the younger kids.
Second, our older elementary RE (3rd through 5th grade) as well as the Middle School/High School group (5th through 12th grade) will begin meeting on Tuesday evenings from 6:00 p.m. – 8:00 p.m. (doors will be open at 5:30, and we will start with pizza around 6:00). The 5th grade overlap between these two groups simply means that we will move kids up to the older group when we think they are ready. We are still formulating our plans for curriculum for the older REgroup. Tuesday evening RE will start on March 5th!
The Middle School/High School group’s long term goal is to explore many different religious paths. We will be kicking things off by learning about “The Big Questions” using the UUA course Riddle and Mystery. This course discusses 16 big questions which we will choose from for our discussions. The first three echo Paul Gauguin’s famous triptych: Where do we come from? What are we? Where are we going? The next ten, including Does God exist? and What happens when you die?, could be found on almost anyone’s list of basic life inquiries. The final three are increasingly Unitarian Universalist: Can we ever solve life’s mystery? How can I know what to believe? What does Unitarian Universalism mean to me? We are working on selecting which and how many of these questions we will discuss.
Our kids for the most part don’t have a lot of context for discussions of religion (as we have learned through previous attempts to discuss religion), so we are using the Big Questions to give the kids the framework necessary for meaningful discussions on this topic. Eventually, as we look at various religions, we will come to discuss the following question: How does each religion address the big questions? This also provides a common context and direction for guest speakers we might invite to discuss various beliefs, which will make comparing these ideas in different religious contexts much easier.
We hope to see you all for Tuesday Religious Exploration!
— Holly Holliday