Religious Education for Children & Youth
                  September 2008 - June 2009

This past summer, the Religious Education Committee (RE) has, under the
guidance of consultant Dawn Star Borchelt, Coordinator of  Religious Education (CRE), worked

very hard to develop a new and improved program that will provide spiritual support and guidance to our children and youth.

1. We have created a new/separate class for our preschool and kindergarten
friends (for children ages 4 to 5)..

2. For the 2008-2009 RE year, our preschool/kindergarten friends will be
using the "We Are Many, We Are One" curriculum. This year-long religious
education program offers our young friends an opportunity to learn about
their religious community and traditions and the freedom to discover and
express their uniqueness. The four units of this program encourages our
friends to use their minds, bodies and emotions to develop thier sense of
identity and self esteem within the UU community and the world.

3. We will be hiring paid, dedicated teachers for the pre-school/kindergarten

and elementary school-age classes. These two teachers will work with the

individual classes exclusively for the entire RE year. We hope that by

providing this consistency, our church community will
be able to more effectively support the spiritual needs of our youth.

4. Our elementary-school aged friends will be using the "Moral Tales" and "A
World of New Friends" curricula.

The "Moral Tales" curriculum attempts to provide our young friends
with the spiritual and ethical tools needed to make choices that are
ethical, moral and reflective of our Unitarian Universalist beliefs and
values.

The "A World of New Friend"s curriculum is designed to introduce a
multi-aged classroom to the eight largest world religions. The l
essons use imaginary classroom members to introduce the world religions.
Throughout the year our young friends will learn about the
faith and traditions of the imaginary student while learning the
basic tenets, customs and celebrations of each faith.

We look forward to seeing our young friends on Sunday Mornings. If you have
any questions about our RE program or curriculum, feel free to contact me, the
Coordinator of Religious Education Tisha Richardson via e-mail at
goodloereligiouseducation@gmail.com .

Religious Education Resources for parents and interested religious educators may be found at these websites:

www.uua.org/clf/betweensundays
www.uua.org/re