St. Andrew's Faith Flight - Children Grades pre-k to 6
Welcome to Faith Flight! The Faith Flight team welcomes the opportunity to share our faith with your children!
What is Faith Flight? Faith Flight is a formation program based on the rotation model of teaching or WorkshopCycles. It is an innovative way to experience church school. It takes seriously the spiritual development of children while providing creative and exciting activities that engage children in a whole new level of learning retention.
What is a morning like?:
9:30am - children arrive, get their passports, and spend time checking in with their pilots. This is a time to visit with other children in their team as well as with their pilots.
9:35am - the week's Bible story is read and followed by The Lord's Prayer (practicing at home is fun!)
9:40am - offering is collected - stewardship for this age group is helping them to understand that God has given them very specific gifts and talents and that God wants them to share those gifts and talents. This is a time to show our children how to be good stewards of their gifts.*
9:45 a.m. - Workshops Immediately following the offering, children are dismissed, by teams, to their classrooms where they explore the story through music, art, drama, etc. They will rotate to a new workshop each week.
Children process upstairs in time to participate in the Eucharist. We welcome and encourage all baptized children to receive communion with their parents.
It is very important that families arrive ON TIME for church school. The program is designed to give parents a chance to breathe, a time for reflection, prayer, or meditation, quiet time just to ‘be' in God's presence. Please take advantage of this time for personal growth. Coffee is provided in the Narthex and opportunities for fellowship are also available.
* A word about Stewardship: We ask that parents find a way to help their child earn the same amount of money per week (in any multiple of 10) so they will understand about saving, spending, and sharing. For example if your child earns $1 a week (in dimes), show them that God only wants them to share 1 dime. They have 9 dimes that they can choose to save or spend. This is a wonderful opportunity to teach them the difference between wants, needs, and desires and to show them how God wants us to put other's needs before our wants and desires. The amount does not matter…what matters is that our children are learning to be good stewards of their time, treasure, and talents. Envelopes are available to take home or when children arrive for class.
Ways to be involved in Faith Flight:
Pilots (teachers-academic year) - Pilots commit to coming to faith flight each scheduled Sunday on the calendar but they never have to plan a lesson. A pilot's responsibility is to build a relationship with each child on their team. They help the children and the Adventure Guides as they move from workshop to workshop.
Adventure Guides (Workshop leaders-3 week cycles) - Adventure guides commit to leading an art, music, kitchen, drama, movie, publishing, or story workshop for the three weeks of the cycle. They teach the same lesson to each of the three teams and modify it based on age. Interesting fact: If one parent from each family volunteered to do one workshop a year…no one would ever need to do more than one.
Story Tellers (15 minutes/class - 3 week cycles): Story tellers read the cycle story to our children. and lead the children in the Lord's Prayer at the beginning of the morning. They are then free to go upstairs for the liturgy.
