Last week I was very excited about my upcoming class with learning stations on the Sacraments of Initiation. I’d like to use this blog post to give a brief “post-mortem” on the class and discuss how the activity was received by my middle school students. The prep for this class was no small undertaking, but fortunately the lesson plan is clearly detailed and laid out at Joe Paprocki’s Catchist’s Journey.
I thought the stations were age appropriate for middle school students, but would have worked for younger students as well. I have a large class with 32 students (a mix of 7th and 8th graders). The students were very receptive to a more interactive approach to learning. We started by breaking the class into 4 groups and starting them at different stations. This seemed to work well at first, but because we only had three adults/catechists, one group was always without an adult leader, and this proved problematic as we progressed through the stations. This was the result of poor planning on my part. I should have asked for a few parent volunteers, and that would have helped to ensure that all groups progress through the stations in a timely and orderly fashion.
I made a few changes to some of the stations, but for the most part stuck to the script. As I mentioned before, the kids really embraced the various forms of interactive learning. We meet for 1 hour and 15 minutes, but taking into account opening/closing prayers, attendance, announcements and other class business, we really only have an hour for instruction. We could have benefitted from having a little more time. Some of the activities took a little longer than others, which caused bottlenecks at times. Now that I’ve established where those log jams occur, I can route the students differently in future classes.
Bottom line, the class was a great experience, and I will definitely do it again. If you are considering using this lesson plan, I would encourage you to do so. Don’t worry if things don’t go perfectly. Based on my personal experience, I can offer two pieces of advice. First, consider your class size and make sure you have an adequate number of adults to lead students through the stations. Second, consider the actual amount of class time you have available to you. It may be worthwhile to split the stations into 2 classes.
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