Tuesday 13 September 2011

Dating Decisions

This weeks lesson was on dating decisions.  In preparing this lesson I took highly into account one of our church values, which is that youth should not be dating until they are 16 years of age.  This allows time for an individual to grow and mature before entering the dating scene.  Hopefully church values and morals are accepted by youth at this age and a stronger sense of who they are and the person they really want to date is established.

One of the first things I did when getting ready to start preparing this lesson, was get myself into a comfortable position to read through the lesson outline in the young womens manual.  My chosen space was my bed.  I lay down with a bunch of pillows under my head  The resources I had to help me prepare this lesson were as follows:
  • standard exercise book
  • Young Womens Lesson Manual
  • pen
  • highlighter
  • Young Womens Personal Progress book (achievement book for girls in the young womens programme)
The lesson covered scriptures and quotes by church leaders regarding the topic of dating.
Now 12-13 yr old girls don't really want to talk about this kind of stuff with their Sunday school teacher, so I decided to incorporate a technique that would relax the teaching envrionment - food.   I decided I'd take some pop-corn for the girls to pass around in a circle to help open the girls up to sharing thier thoughts on dating.  I also made up an idea for a dating game in which I would ask the girls one at a time to tell me what they would do if they were in a sticky date situations.  Some of the dating scenario were - "If a boy you don't know asks you to dance, what do you say?" , or "If a boy you've been on a couple of dates with leans in for a kiss, how would you react?".  Real cute and simple stuff like that. The girls love games, and learn sometimes more from them.

The girls absolutely loved it.  They were laughing and gigling and really opening up to the awkward topic of dating. I loved teaching this lesson.  I felt relaxed and confident with what I was teaching, and was happy with the end result - smiling faces leaving the room.

1 comment:

  1. Hi Yas,
    What a great blog, I really walked through the journey of you taking the lesson and can imagine what the girls were all thinking.

    I guess since doing this paper I can assume you were talking about affordances and perhaps communication with others and connections? Have a think about being able to make this clear within each of your postings what you are addressing.

    Goodluck!

    Lucy

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