Saturday, January 19, 2013

Balancing Teaching Across the Ages

I am currently in the middle of a dilemma. I have children. Yep, I probably could stop there! Enough said! But really, we have an exchange student who is now 18. Then we have three girls, ages 14, 12 and 7. Then we have a 3 year old son.

It lends to some challenges when we try to teach something to the children together. Oh, I can attempt to teach them about housekeeping, and responsibility, and respect and that is pretty universal but to get into something deeper! WOW!

So I am working on something and I am kind of unsure how it will work but we are going to start trying it!

I won a packet and poster from We Choose Virtues and we are trying to figure out how best to implement that into a family lesson time. I have the posters that I won posted on the pantry door where everyone can see it every day.



Most of the cards that deal with the virtues are geared toward our 7 year old. At least in my opinion. So, how do I take one lesson and turn it into a lesson for the entire family?

Right now my plan goes something like this....Each child will be responsible for one part of the lesson

  1. Read appropriate Scripture to go with the lesson
  2. Make a game of trying to guess (based on the Scripture) which virtue we are discussing
  3. Read description of virtue and lead a discussion on what exactly it means in our family
  4. Pass out coloring pages I also won that go along with each virtue (I am putting my 3 year old in charge!)
  5. Challenge....older children have a notebook to record times during the week that the see the virtue in action, not only in our family, but in their life that week.
 Does anyone else try to tackle this balance? Do you have a family lesson time or do you try to do it all individually? Do you think this will work for us? I am actually trying to create lesson plans and have an idea to make weekly family devotions based on this model also. Each child or family member can lead one type of lesson all based on the same theme for the week.

Any thoughts?

1 comment:

  1. Just a side note. The reason I didn't include a sample lesson plan for any lesson is because I didn't want to violate any copyrights that might be in place with the We Choose Virtues company. As I see how this works and create my own lesson plans, I will share some examples.

    ReplyDelete