CLASS NEWS

(Ms. Nellie Martinez & Ms. Elma Fontillas, Teachers)

With joy we wish you all a very Merry Christmas and Peace to your household.

After three months, it is time to connect with the family to let you know how the children are progressing in their faith development since they took their first step to basic formation in our Christian faith. We cannot begin to tell you that when we read the story of First Creation they listened with awe. They learned that there is only one God, three in persons. God the father who created us and everything out of nothing, yes including the tiniest creepy crawlers; Jesus the son is our Savior and the Holy Spirit is our helper and guide in making choices. The three persons are called the Blessed Trinity. Our baptism makes us all children of God called the Church. The Pope, the Bishops, the Priests and Deacons lead us to pray and thank God for all his creations we continuously enjoy and sometimes destroy. Prayer is our special way to communicate with God. Prayer is listening and talking to God with love. We introduced to the children the short prayer or a one liner prayer appropriate for their age level. However it is important for them to learn our traditional family prayer. We observed that some of the children still had not learned these prayers. We want to encourage our parents to pray with your children “The Lord’s Prayer, “Hail Mary” and “Glory Be” daily. This practice will help them learn the prayers by heart. We talked about choices. Good choices lead us to friendship with Jesus and bad choices lead us to sin. But God forgives when we express our sorrow.

Step by step we can assure you that the children are learning the ABC”s of our Christian faith. But this is not enough. To make sense of what they had learned in their classroom the Religious Education adapted the Lectionary-Based Catechesis to link with the Curriculum-Based Catechism. The children need to experience the liturgical celebration (attending Sunday Mass) and to hear the Word (participating in the Liturgy of the Word for Children celebration) to fully understand what took place in the classroom. It is through the Word they will come in communion with Jesus and the Community.

As I reflect one morning on the reading according to Luke 2:41 “The Boy In the Temple” it dawned on me that Lectionary-Based Catechesis had been in existence since. When Jesus was a young boy, I have no doubt that he received his religious instructions from his parents, grandparents and other members of the community, then they all get together in pilgrimage to the temple to worship, to hear the Word, to thank God and to celebrate, in other words, to link the classroom catechesis with the liturgical celebration. To the family we invite you to do the same so that we can all come in communion with the Lord and one another.

---Nellie Martinez, BF-2 Catechist