The First Lesson Plan of the New Year

I have recently been assigned a new Primary manual and new teaching partners. As a team, we're going to have to establish who is teaching when. For now, all we've decided is that I'm going first.

This year, our Primary class is learning from the Old Testament, starting with a lesson on what happened before the beginning. Seriously, the creation is literally the first thing that happens in the Old Testament, but we're not going to cover that until two weeks from now. Until then, we're going to focus on the premortal existence, and I plan to teach it a little bit differently than I had taught my previous lessons.

When teaching about the Doctrine and Covenants and early church history, there was a continuing story linking almost every week's lesson with the lessons that go before and after it. As such, it was important to cover each section of the story and how they relate to each other, even if those connections aren't clearly spelled out in the scriptures. Since my class loved to read, and the manual explained the stories fairly clearly, I usually asked my students to take turns reading selected paragraphs from the manual, which we would then discuss as a class. This was a great way to encourage participation, both in reading and in discussion, and get the story across to the class.

However, for this lesson at least, there isn't much of a story that needs to be continued from one lesson to another. Next week's lesson will add more detail to the situation we'll learn about in this week's lesson, but the story doesn't really get started until the week after that. This lesson is more like a preface, and it focusses more on the doctrine than on the story. That's good news for me, in a way, because it means that it makes more sense to use scriptures than the manual.

So, here's my plan: After getting all the introductions out of the way, I will ask questions listed in or inspired by the manual, and I'll give the kids a chance to answer them. After the kids have given an answer or two (or none, if they can't guess), we'll turn to the scriptures, and I'll ask one of the kids to read a few verses that tell us the answer to the question. Then we'll discuss the question and answer for a bit and move on to the next question.

One potential downside to using this method is the time it takes to look up scriptures. When I was having the children read out of the manual, I could simply hand the manual to them and let them read the paragraph I pointed to. But I don't want to just hand the kids scriptures with verses highlighted and ready to read. I want them to learn how to search the scriptures and find verses themselves. That skill is less important now that we have digital scriptures that are easy to navigate and search through, but I don't want my Primary kids to be completely hopeless with a physical set of scriptures. We'll at least try using physical scriptures to find the relevant verses. If searching the scriptures ends up taking too much class time, either I'll reduce the number of questions I'm asking or I'll switch back to digital scriptures. That's something I'll have to figure out in the classroom.

Before that, I'll need to decide what questions I'll want to ask and which scriptures I'll use to answer them. Thankfully, the lesson manual already provides a fair number of questions, with scripture references related to them. We'll definitely want to use Abraham 3, since it covers many of the key points of the lesson. Alma 34 and Alma 40 might be useful for covering the middle parts of the plan. And there are several verses in D&C 76 that we could use to discuss the three degrees of glory.

I've made a list of some scriptures we'll want to use, and I made it on paper so I can bring it into the classroom with me. I hope it doesn't take too terribly long to look the verses up in physical scriptures. If it does, I might have to cut some scriptures out and explain those points of doctrine by paraphrasing.

I feel fairly well-prepared. Essentially, this is a basic Plan of Salvation lesson, with emphasis on the Premortal Spirit World and on how we were taught this plan before we were born. With my current plans, plus some time to introduce ourselves and the Old Testament, I should be able to fill all the time I'll have and get this new year off to a good start.