Children
are curious, receptive and eager to learn, and
parents and teachers can help direct this energy toward
the Good News. Reading spiritual literature together—at
bedtime, on rainy days, and in the classroom — is a wonderful way to harness natural
interest and help a child grow
closer to God. Story time, like any other time, is an opportunity to show children how to stay Christ-centered.
Selecting Reading Material
- Ask experienced teachers and bookstores to
recommend age-appropriate, spiritually rich
books to add to your
shelves, such as lives of saints written for children, collections of children’s Bible stories, and
picture books with a Christian message.
- Look
for colorful illustrations or Byzantine icons, which will help keep children’s attention.
- Cultivate
a love for God by choosing books that express theological
concepts in ways and words that your child can
understand, thereby planting seeds in the child’s mind and
soul that can be cultivated over a lifetime.
- Choose
stories that reinforce one of the constant themes of
early childhood spiritual education: God’s love for
both humanity and individual human beings.
- Another
recurring focus is that God loves us so much He gave
us our Savior and Lord Jesus Christ; from an early
age, you can expose children to the idea of having a relationship with Christ.
During Story Time
Create
active learning opportunities and extensions to an exercise that might seem passive. There are
many ways to actively engage young children
even as you read to them:
- Set a standard for daily and weekly reading
patterns. Consistency and repetition will
make spiritual literature important
in the child’s life.
- Young
children are eager to make decisions, and could be
offered a choice, such as, “Would you like to read the May page about St. Constantine
and St. Helen, or would you like to read the April page about St. George?”
Small children might simply point to the page of their choice.
- Allow the child to hold the book or to turn the
pages while you are reading. Keep the Story Alive Set aside some quality time
after story time. Extending the children’s engagement with the story is a
powerful way to support learning and remembering, especially at a young age, when
imagination and invention are developing.
- Follow every story with a short complementary prayer—in
this way, you can reflect on and reinforce the theme. Combining prayer and
reading evokes the grace of God and the work of the Holy Spirit.
- Ask concrete but open-ended questions about the story,
allowing children to answer freely, retelling and reinterpreting the story in
their own words.
- Stimulate curiosity and creativity; for example, ask
a child to act out a simple sentence from the story. The adult might say, “Do
you think you can show me the look on St. Helen’s face when she discovered the Cross?”
Adding a physical act like this will help the child remember the message.
Acting is practical in Sunday school classrooms—no materials or mess—and is
quite fun at home, too.
By Maria C. Khoury, EdD
Source: https://s3.amazonaws.com/praxis-magazine/Praxis-v08-1-2008-Fall.pdf
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