Theresa: Even Batman has Robin …

Each week, Theresa Pizzuto, our director of RE, ensures that ALL the children of UUFC have a safe and meaningful experience. She’s a superhero, but still, THIS IS NO SMALL FEAT. 

In fact, this requires a small army. A number of UUFC members already assist the RE program by teaching our children each week. The RE committee is busy, too.  We spend our time choosing and designing curriculum, planning special events and service projects, writing blog posts, and oh yeah, we teach, too.

If that wasn’t enough, someone has to coordinate all the people who volunteer. Someone has to manage paid personnel. Someone has to inform the rest of the fellowship about all that we have to offer our children. Theresa’s got that part covered … but there aren’t enough hours in a week to do all the rest!

WE NEED YOUR HELP!

• Are you creative? We need help creating activity packets for children. This is easy! Theresa provides you with baskets of supplies, and you simply put supplies in plastic bags!
• We select stories for “Spirit Play”—the elementary learners’ curriculum. We use 2D and 3D props to tell the stories, and then put them together as kits. Could you laminate pictures and then cut them out? Could you help create these kits?
• Do you like to organize supplies? Other volunteers have worked to organize our supply room, but thanks to the law of entropy, this is a never-ending task.  We need help keeping things organized in the supply rooms and classrooms.  We sometimes need supply inventory updates.
• Are you tech-savvy? It would be wonderful if someone could help upload pictures to our photo sharing site. Theresa takes the pictures; you just need to upload them!
• Do you know how to update the UUFC website? We have taken the time to write new prose for our website, but we need someone to add it to the site, and to identify content that needs refreshing periodically.

THERE ARE SO MANY WAYS TO HELP! You can perform lots of these tasks on your own time. Or better yet, volunteer to meet with Theresa on a regular basis and help with the most pressing tasks!

Send us an email, or talk to us on Sunday!

A Thankful Month

November is a month of gratitude and we are grateful for all the support for Religious Education from the congregation. Whether you teach, or bring children and youth, help organize events and lessons or even smile and say hello to a child, thank you!

A joint event between UUFC and Peace Church brought out plenty of people to make ornaments. In the four weeks leading up to Christmas, we will celebrate a different part of the world, as well as a different wish for the future. These are:

• Africa has a drum ornament, and represents Joy
• Europe has a painted egg ornament and represents Hope
• Asia has peace cranes and represents Peace
• The Americas have a ribbon tree ornament and represents Love

All enjoyed making ornaments and sipping hot cider. Look for the trees and ornaments throughout the month of December!

Classes continue to explore various religions through Spirit Play (in the Early Learners) and exploration of food, plays and videos. This fall, we've done everything from Pagan stories to Hinduism to Confucianism to Zoroastrianism, as we've started with the oldest religions.

Make plans to see our movie get together! We will be viewing The Gods Must Be Crazy on December 6, at 3:00 pm. This 1984 sleeper hit follows Xi as he tries to rid his community of an absent-minded gift (a Coke bottle) from the gods that results in dark emotions among his people. Adults, youth and children are all invited for this group gathering. 

Growing the program

The RE program believes in teaching the children and youth about stewardship, and our latest fundraisers have been an enormous success.

Our dog biscuit fundraiser for the UUFC auction netted $98.50. We pre-sold $50 worth of biscuits, and the others were sold at Trading Post. Max did a fabulous job of helping us sell those. If you have pictures of your dogs enjoying the biscuits, let us know! We'd love to see them!

Our trick or treat event was also a great fundraiser. We had great fundraisers: King Tut, Rainbow Dash, a renaissance woman, a transformer, several princesses and even Sergio Romero (the Argentinian futbol goalie) helped collect money to buy some plants for the South Carolina Botanical Garden. We hope to buy a few plants in honor of John Turner. We collected $98.72 and Carolyn rounded that up to an even $100.

Thanks for your support of the RE children's fundraising efforts. We are happy that the children and youth can participate in growing the congregation in many ways, including financially supporting the fellowship.

Trick or Treat!

On October 26, bring your pocket change! We will be trick or treating for the South Carolina Botanical Garden. We've done trick or treat for other organizations in the past, but decided to collect for one closer to home. The students have recently worked in the butterfly garden and wish to support this great organization!

So, enjoy the costumes and help the kids have a successful event!

Namaste

If you missed out on the dog biscuit auction item, we have others left for sale at Trading Post! So far, the dogs who have gotten their biscuits have given them two paws up. We will have a table set up on October 19. Go by and get a bag of three very large biscuits or ten smaller biscuits for only $5. The money raised goes to the trading post funds. The teens will be happy to help you with these. So, go by and see a teen and buy some treats for your favorite dog.

Our sessions on Hinduism is off to a great start. The early learners were introduced to the world's oldest living tradition. If you see an early learner, greet them with a "Namaste." The teens got to cook, making a side dish of fruit, potatoes and sweet potatoes, with Indian spices.

And, if you missed the picture opportunity for the time capsule, you can still email a picture to sarahjaeschke at gmail dot com, but do it very soon. She will be putting this together in the next few days.

A Few of Their Favorite Things

UUFC is creating a time capsule and we want the children and youth to be a part of it!

We know that special objects are just that and we don't want them to part with anything they love. Instead, we want to take a picture of them with their special object. It should be something that has meaning and importance to them. They might also wish to consider, as one teen put it, finding an object that they would be proud to show off when the time capsule is rediscovered.

On October 12, the children and youth should bring their special object to class. We'll then take a picture of each child with their object and maybe find out why the object is important to them.

Teens will be cooking at Founders' House, so our photographer will come by around 11:20 to take any pictures.

Children in the nursery can participate too! We will get their pictures either before or after the lesson.

If you can't be there on Sunday, feel free to send us a picture instead. Use this email: sarahjaeschke at gmail dot com.

And that's it! We will take the pictures and create a collage to add to the time capsule.

Thanks in advance for the help with this fun project.

For the DOGS

Ten lucky dogs will get handcrafted biscuits from the UUFC children and youth. Last Sunday, 11 youth got together for pizza and baking. A great time was had by all and more than 100 biscuits were baked and bagged for the dog owners to bring home for them next Sunday. We had three teams of 3-4, with the older youth helping the children as they worked together mixing, kneading and rolling dog biscuits. While the biscuits baked, they all helped in making special gift tags.

The goal of the event was for the children to be involved in stewardship for the church. By helping make dog biscuits which members of the congregation buy, they understand they are helping support their spiritual community.

Plus there was pizza!

If you didn't manage to bid on these special treats, we do have a few extra sets leftover which can be purchased at the next Trading Post. We have bags of 10 small biscuits or 3 very large biscuits, which sold at the auction for $5 a bag. Bonus: each bag of biscuits comes with a special drawing from one of the youth. See an RE board member or Theresa for more information or just see us at Trading Post!

A New School Year!

We are ready to welcome our children and youth back for a new year of Religious Education!

This year, our lessons will be about World Religions. This will work nicely with our first Sunday services, also about World Religions. Teens will be in those services as an introduction to each religion. During the rest of the month, they will use art, drama, food, and field trips to deepen their understanding of each World Religion topic explored.

Leading this group are six terrific moderators: Chad, Karen, Meg, Drake, Will and Beth.

The Early Learners will continue the Spirit Play model we introduced last year. Spirit Play, modeled partly on the Montessori method of learning, encourages children to ask questions of wonder. Stories from all traditions, including our own, introduce children to promises (principles) of Unitarian Universalism. To reinforce these, children have independent work time as part of the lesson. The stories this year will mainly focus on the World Religions topics explored during the first Sunday service each month, along with some of our basic UU lessons.

Teaching this year is a group of familiar volunteers, as they were all teachers last year. Beth, Kari, Kathy, Sarah, Jan, Hala, Christine, Carl, Martha and Carolyn. Thanks so much for coming back!

All teachers and moderators met on August 17 for a teacher orientation and all are excited for another year of teaching the youth of UUFC.  The first session will have already taken place on August 31, along with our parent orientation.

Safety First

The events in New Orleans earlier this summer have reminded us to have a good plan for emergencies. Currently, Reverend Terre, Cecil Huey, Beau Blackwell and DRE Theresa Pizzuto are working on a safety plan for similar situations. Once completed, this will be presented to the teachers, parents and congregants. Look for a date in early November for a congregational-wide fire drill during Sunday morning. The classes will have several practice drills before that date. Stay tuned for more details.

In the interim, we have asked teachers to please keep cell phones with them in class. In case of fire, look for your children at the shed behind Founders’ House. Also know that our check-in and check-out process is a way of protecting your child.

Spotlight: Carolyn Turner

Carolyn is not ashamed to admit that she was shamed into getting involved. She realized how few of the youth she actually knew and decided to change that. Beginning as a part-time substitute, Carolyn ended up serving on the RE committee as well as teaching Spirit Play. She is currently in her third year with the committee and teaching. With her experience as an early elementary school teacher, we are happy to have Carolyn’s help! She enjoys teaching, in part, “because I've enjoyed see their development, both intellectually as well as developmentally. They are a very diverse group and full of interesting insights and information and most of all, energy. Hugs are always most welcome, too.” We’re sure the children enjoy the hugs as much as Carolyn does.