Wrapping up October and New Roman Missal lessons

Over the last couple of weeks we have had a bit of a jumbled schedule in my parish, including one week off for our local "Fall Break", so my group gatherings have been a little bit out of order; however, it is worthwhile for me to share here, at least in summary, what I have done to wrap up our preparation for the New Roman Missal changes.

I decided to bring in a "special guest" to help our children learn the new music that is coming with the changes to the Mass. Our parish has elected to use the Mass of St. Ann by Ed Bolduc, which you can find here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bL4nRwlIHnk We are phasing in the music slowly over the course of the next few months, starting with the Holy Holy Holy, the Memorial Acclamation, and the Great Amen. The leader of our Life Teen music group is an amazing musician and a very "cool" young man that I knew the kids would love to hear sing and play guitar, so it is he who came to our group gathering. Line by line he taught the songs, then we all sang them together. The kids enjoyed it as much as I expected that they would!

Finally, I felt that we were ready to review all that I had been going over with the children during our group gatherings, so I decided to wrap it up with a competition of JEOPARDY. For this, I use the Jeopardy Gaming System which is available through a company called Educational Insights (example found here at Amazon.com: http://www.amazon.com/Educational-Insights-7910-Classroom-Jeopardy/dp/B000EEX7FM ) With this system, you can create your own questions and answers, and it plays out like a real game of Jeopardy, complete with buzzers and an electronic scoreboard. To make this fun, I decided to use catechist/student teams. I started by telling the students that we were going to play, and then asking them to nominate, by pointing, clapping, yelling, etc... to their catechist, if they wanted their catechist to be my contestant. That led to lots of fun and noisy competition, but I did select three catechists and asked each of them to select a student to play with them. I now had three teams of two ready to play. I had created the following four categories: Opening Rites, Reading Time, Liturgy of the Eucharist, and Music. There were 5 questions under each category with ascending "dollar" values, and then the game ended with a Final Jeopardy question. If you have any interest in the exact questions I created, I am more than happy to send them to you; simply email me at jtruitt@stolivers.com any time! My contestants all received prizes for their efforts, with a special prize going to our winners. It was a lot of fun for the players, as well as for the audience cheering them on. All in all, I have to say that the children of St. Olivers are probably better prepared for the upcoming changes than most of the adults in our parish! :-) Stay tuned as we will now move on to other group gathering topics! Thanks for reading!