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Sunday school, week 5
Oct. 15th, 2012 10:58 pmYesterday I managed to teach RE for the second time this year. (I missed two weeks because of illness and one because of a family visit.) The lesson was about ways people are alike and ways people are different -- or more specifically, about physical disabilities. Apparently it is the second half of a two part lesson, and the previous week was about gender, race, nationality, and stuff like that.
All three of my co-teachers were unavailable so I had Renee (who I have taught with in previous years) as a substitute. And that was functional, more or less, but we really could have used a third person because the lesson involved several activity stations and we couldn't monitor all of them at once. *sigh*
Also, it's pretty hard to lead a bunch of five- and six-year-old kids to think about intangible similarities (i.e., "We all have thoughts, we all have feelings, we all have dreams") instead of focusing on things like "We all have two hands!" Which is awkward when part of the point of the lesson is that no, we do NOT in fact all have hands and feet or functional eyes and ears. :-/ I tried to segue into that by pointing out that I wear glasses because my eyes don't work right. (I am not going to be PC and say they "work differently" because fuck that. Nearsightedness is a malfunction, not a sparkly fairy mystical "difference." (Even if I do like the way I can take my glasses off at night and watch lights blur into starry Van Gogh fractals.)) I think I said something to the effect of, "But because all people have inherent worth and value, and because we are the same INSIDE (thoughts, hopes, feelings!), we try to find ways to work around physical differences." And then I talked about Braille and audiobooks and sign language and that South African Olympic runner with the artificial legs -- all the kids had heard of him, interestingly enough!
So overall I guess it worked out as well as could be expected, even if the activity phase was a bit out of control and the sign language station ended up basically ignored because we didn't have anyone there to help the kids practice a few basic words. Ah well, so it goes.
All three of my co-teachers were unavailable so I had Renee (who I have taught with in previous years) as a substitute. And that was functional, more or less, but we really could have used a third person because the lesson involved several activity stations and we couldn't monitor all of them at once. *sigh*
Also, it's pretty hard to lead a bunch of five- and six-year-old kids to think about intangible similarities (i.e., "We all have thoughts, we all have feelings, we all have dreams") instead of focusing on things like "We all have two hands!" Which is awkward when part of the point of the lesson is that no, we do NOT in fact all have hands and feet or functional eyes and ears. :-/ I tried to segue into that by pointing out that I wear glasses because my eyes don't work right. (I am not going to be PC and say they "work differently" because fuck that. Nearsightedness is a malfunction, not a sparkly fairy mystical "difference." (Even if I do like the way I can take my glasses off at night and watch lights blur into starry Van Gogh fractals.)) I think I said something to the effect of, "But because all people have inherent worth and value, and because we are the same INSIDE (thoughts, hopes, feelings!), we try to find ways to work around physical differences." And then I talked about Braille and audiobooks and sign language and that South African Olympic runner with the artificial legs -- all the kids had heard of him, interestingly enough!
So overall I guess it worked out as well as could be expected, even if the activity phase was a bit out of control and the sign language station ended up basically ignored because we didn't have anyone there to help the kids practice a few basic words. Ah well, so it goes.
