The World of First and Second Graders

The World of First
and Second Graders

A significant reward that comes with LiFE is the joy you'll experience as you walk together with your first and second graders on a personal journey of faith. You'll get to know each child in your group—what each one is thinking, feeling, imagining, and wondering. Not only will you have an opportunity to influence young minds and hearts, but you'll also be influenced by your children's simple, emerging faith in the God to whom we all belong!
      What follows here is a brief description of some of the characteristics you'll see in the children you lead and learn from. Although it is no substitute for getting to know the children in your group firsthand, we do hope it will give you some insight into what you may anticipate from first and second graders.

Intellectual Characteristics
Like younger children, first and second graders still depend very much on concrete experiences. They still love to touch, taste, feel, smell, explore, watch—and wonder! By our adult standards for thinking, the minds of six-, and seven-, and eight-year-olds are by no means logical. Because children of this age are still not capable of reasoning—or of organizing abstract faith concepts along logical lines—the leading we do must relate directly, simply, and concretely to experiences the children have already had or to new experiences we can share with them. It's important to remember that learning still happens best through doing.
      But the world of first and second grade is beginning to fill up with symbols—numbers, letters, words. This is the exciting age of learning to read and write! Your challenge will be to share this excitement and to use these emerging skills as tools for asking faith questions and for helping the children make personal responses. You will see significant changes taking place in your children as the year proceeds and they become better readers and writers. We've tried to include a variety of learning activities in each session so that your learning and growing won't depend entirely on the children's ability to read or write well. Your job will be to adapt and tailor each session and its activities to best meet the needs and abilities of your children.
      Your own use of language will also be critical in your interaction with the boys and girls in your group. It's easy to forget that at this age children still interpret all they see, hear, and experience in a very literal way. Things are as they appear. Consequently, figures of speech, abstract symbolism, and analogies about faith concepts are seldom appropriate for use in conversation with young children. (That's also why we've put a heavy emphasis on inviting children to wonder about and to express in their own words what Scripture stories and faith concepts mean to them—rather than imposing on them our own adult comparisons and conclusions.)
      Remember, too, that long periods of sitting and listening are still difficult for first and second graders. You'll want to plan your session each week so that they have periodic opportunities to move around. Games, stories, and other activities should be relatively brief, with transitional periods that enable movement from one part of the room to another. Try for a reasonable balance between times of quiet listening and active participation.
      While it may be hard to detect a young child's individual learning style, it's important to recognize that we all learn in multiple ways. Nurture each child's strengths, and encourage everyone to enjoy various ways of expressing the session truths through art, physical activities, music, words, numbers, and group interaction. Fill your time together with variety, color, and many invitations to the children to share their own experiences and feelings with you and the group.

Social Characteristics
Home and family are still the main shaping forces in the lives of first and second graders. That's why it's particularly important for you to establish a warm relationship with the parents of the children in your group. You'll also want to include many home- and parent-related illustrations as you talk together about spiritual concerns and faith concepts. The love and trust that the children learn at home will form the pattern for understanding such concepts as they relate to our God and to the broader community of faith.
     Unlike preschool children, however, your first and second graders are experiencing an ever-widening social world. They are now in school full-time, learning new skills and making adjustments to many new and important people in their lives. Though still primarily concerned with themselves and centered in their own perceptions of the world around them, first and second graders are becoming increasingly sensitive to the needs and wants of other people. They are becoming more and more open to learning about social and communal concepts (like "church") because they are experiencing them firsthand.
      You'll find lots of encouragement in LiFE to nurture an atmosphere of community in your group. It will be your challenge to invite the children, by example as well as with words, to trust each other, to wonder together, to share experiences and perceptions, and to grow together in the faith we share as children of God.

Spiritual Characteristics
LiFE materials begin with the assumption that young children have a very real spiritual nature—a deep sense of who God is. Sofia Cavalletti, an internationally known religious educator, makes a strong case for this "mysterious bond between God and the child." (See p. 25 of her book, The Religious Potential of the Child: The Description of an Experience with Children from Ages Three to Six.)In her work with young children, Cavalletti experienced this "sense of God" even in children who had not been born into Christian homes. For example, she tells of a very young child who was growing up without a trace of religious influence:

The child did not go to nursery school; no one at home, not even her grandmother, who was herself an atheist, had ever spoken of God; the child had never gone to church. One day she questioned her father about the origin of the world: "Where does the world come from?" Her father replied, in a manner consistent with his ideas, with a discourse that was materialistic in nature; then he added: "However, there are those who say that all this comes from a very powerful being, and they call him God." At this point the little girl began to run like a whirlwind around the room in a burst of joy, and exclaimed: "I knew what you told me wasn't true; it is Him, it is Him!"(p. 32).

But who is God to a young child? What is a first or second grader's concept of God? Because young children think so concretely and interpret their experiences so literally, their concept of God follows this pattern too. Children typically describe God in terms of a physical identity with human characteristics. This tendency, paired with the child's eager readiness to accept what she is told, makes your task as a leader, a model, and a nurturer of faith, a serious one. It will be essential for you to focus more on attitudes and actions that exhibit faith than on presenting complex religious concepts.
      You'll probably find that your first and second graders are aware and concerned about right and wrong too. Although they'll quite likely still define sin in terms of its immediate consequences (e.g., "Taking cookies is wrong if Mom catches me!"), you can begin to show them the joy that comes with forgiveness.
      Though an understanding of biblical and doctrinal concepts is certainly a part of the LiFE curriculum, at the first- and second-grade level we seek first of all to instill in the children a sense of God's love and our response—within the context of common everyday experiences. The language of faith as captured in the Q&Adocument, studied later by fifth and sixth graders, is still too abstract to present to first and second graders without confusing them. But positive, uncomplicated attitudes like trust and love and care for each other are not out of reach for young children.
      In keeping with first and second graders' expanding concepts of themselves and their relationship to others, LiFE seeks to nurture faith by giving the children a love for the stories of Scripture and by laying attitudinal foundations for understanding and living out the great truths of Scripture.

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