Lengthy Lesson Schedule - Digging Into Details

For a couple of weeks now, I've been playing the role of a substitute helper in a Primary class at church, but this week, I'll be doing a bit more than trying to convince the boys to stop leaning their chairs back. This week, I'm going to teach a lesson in Primary.

In Primary, lessons happen slowly. While an adult class might spend one lesson on the Restoration, the Primary kids, or at least the ones I've been asked to teach, stretch out the Joseph Smith story so that there are three separate lessons for Moroni's visit to Joseph Smith, Joseph Smith receiving the gold plates, and the four-year span of time between those two events. I will be teaching about that four-year time span.

Incidentally, this Primary lesson manual also has distinct lessons for "Joseph Smith Begins to Translate the Gold Plates" and "Joseph Smith Translates the Gold Plates," and odds are that I'll teach at least one of those lessons, so it'll be interesting to explore what the distinctions are.

This stretching of the story over a long period of time accomplishes many good things. First, it gives the Primary kids enough time to learn all of the essential elements of the Restoration, despite only being able to focus on a lesson for a handful of minutes at a time. And second, it allows those who teach the Primary kids an opportunity to dive deeply into the details of a story they already knew fairly well.

For example, I already knew that a few years passed between the time Joseph Smith first saw the plates and the time he actually obtained them, and I knew that he received annual lessons during that time, but I never really stopped to think about what he must have been learning over those years, or why it was important for Joseph Smith to spend so much time preparing to receive the plates. In adult classes, we sometimes gloss over the time between the First Vision and Joseph obtaining the plates, little realizing that that period of time is a few months over seven years long. Joseph Smith was 14 years old when he learned that God had a work for him to do, and he was 21 by the time he and the world were ready for that work to begin. A lot can happen during that period of time. I think that God was wise to provide for such a long period of preparation and learning.

The same is true in Primary. The lessons are drawn out over long periods of time, partly so there's time for each part of the message to sink in, partly to give the learners time to apply and practice what they're learning, and partly to give the students enough time to learn as they mature and mature as they learn. I like this drawn-out lesson schedule. I think it's helpful, both for the young students and the experienced teachers, to be able to spend so much time focussing on each detail. In fact, even with this lesson schedule, I'm sure there are still many details we miss. There's a lot more to the Gospel and the history of the church than can be covered in a handful of lessons, which is partly why I'm grateful that I'll have the opportunity to dig into the details that I usually overlook.