Kindergarten and First Grades 2009-2010

In the 2009-2010 Religious Education school year, we will be focusing on two curricula.  The majority of the year will be the program called Wonderful Welcome.  During January and February we will be taking a recess from that programming to offer OWL (Our Whole Lives.)

Wonderful Welcome

Welcome. Welcome in love. Welcome in friendship.Welcome in faith. The Wonderful Welcome curriculum engages and challenges leaders and children alike to explore how and why we are willing to welcome others into our lives. We welcome not only strangers, but family, our peers, our neighbors and even entities that are not people such as our animal friends and nature itself.

How do we welcome? We welcome by sharing intangible gifts, those positive qualities which we all have inside us such as kindness, love, invitation, covenant and empathy. In this program, children learn to articulate and express a variety of intangible gifts, empowering them to share these gifts with others.

The intangible gifts explored in Wonderful Welcome are all components of welcoming itself, a core Unitarian Universalist value. This program helps children understand and practice other values central to Unitarian Universalism such as friendship, hospitality, and fairness. It offers children safe, positive and intentional ways to relate to one another, the people in their families, and the world around them as they investigate how they use gifts they can’t see or touch to welcome others into their lives. Children will think about the intangible gifts they bring into the world, and the intangible gifts they receive. When and how do they get love from others? When and how do they show empathy? Who has given them the gift of friendship? How do they show that they want to be someone’s friend? What does “helping” look like?

Each session begins with a Wonder Box that contains a symbol of the session’s theme. The Wonder Box engages the children’s curiosity and encourages a spirit of inquiry and reflection. In the first session, the box is empty to introduce the concept of ” intangible.” Throughout the program, a Wonder Box poster serves as a continual reminder of the gifts explored in each session.

You can find the curriculum in its entirety here.

Our Whole Lives (OWL)

Our Whole Lives helps participants make informed and responsible decisions about their sexual health and behavior. It equips participants with accurate, age-appropriate information in six subject areas: human development, relationships, personal skills, sexual behavior, sexual health, and society and culture. Grounded in a holistic view of sexuality, Our Whole Lives provides not only facts about anatomy and human development, but helps participants to clarify their values, build interpersonal skills, and understand the spiritual, emotional, and social aspects of sexuality.

Our Whole Lives uses approaches that work. The curricula are based on theGuidelines for Comprehensive Sexuality Education produced by the National Guidelines Task Force, a group of leading health, education, and sexuality professionals assembled by the Sexuality Information and Education Council of the United States (SIECUS).

Our Whole Lives covers topics and skills that both parents and students want to have available but schools are less likely to cover. The Kaiser Family Foundation has an interesting report on this subject called “Sex Education in America: A View from Inside the Nation’s Classrooms.” New national surveys are challenging the convention that Americans are reluctant to have sexual health issues taught in school, the surveys show that most parents, along with educators and students themselves, would expand sex education courses and curriculum.

The Our Whole Lives Values

• Self Worth
• Sexual Health
• Responsibility
• Justice and Inclusivity

Each level of Our Whole Lives Offers…

• Up-to-date information and honest, age-appropriate answers to all participants’ questions
• Activities to help participants clarify values and improve decision-making skills
• Effective group-building to create a safe and supportive peer group
• Education about sexual abuse, exploitation, and harassment
• Opportunities to critique media messages about gender and sexuality
• Acceptance of diversity
• Encouragement to act for justice
• A well-designed, teacher-friendly leaders’ guide
• Parent orientation programs that affirm parents as the primary sexuality educators of their children
• Sexuality and Our Faith, an optional religious component for Unitarian Universalist and United Church of Christ settings

Our Whole Lives is appropriate for use in a variety of congregational, school, and community settings, including classrooms, after-school programs, and youth groups. Although developed by two religious organizations, Our Whole Livescontains no religious references or doctrine. Religious references are contained in a Unitarian Universalist and United Church of Christ companion publication,Sexuality and Our Faith.

You can find more out here.