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Hi Yvette,
Great but tough topic! There is a great resource from REtoday using pictures of creation to get young people thinking. You can find them here: http://shop.retoday.org.uk/9781904024583.
I have personally taught lessons on creation but only to Year 7s, and it was quite a fun lesson. The biggest learning point in these lessons for the young people was learning that they could ask questions and we always set aside a big chunk of the end of the lesson for question time. It is great seeing a class of 11/12 year olds begin to realise that there are no easy answers, and that some of the things they think they knew, maybe they don’t anymore. For a class of 14/15 year olds, they are used to that. Most of their lives are pretty confusing! Although I haven’t done a creation lesson with this year group, or with the angle that you have been asked to prepare, I would assume that the question aspect, as in my year 7 lessons, would be important, to allow the students to be able to share their opinions and have others hear them.
A good way to facilitate this would be to play a creation game (no such thing exists yet, as far as I know), but it would be pretty easy to come up with. You could design a set of 20 statements all about creation, covering a whole range of beliefs and interpretations of scripture. The students would then have to discuss in groups what they thought of these statements and have the opportunity to place them on a ‘game board’ in order of importance or accuracy as they saw it.
Hi!
In the Autumn i did lessons for Y9 and Y11 classes on Christians and Creation.
I started with a disclaimer that I wasn’t there to try and convince them one way or the other, but to get them to think about the topic.
We did an activity looking at what the Bible says about Creation - with the aim of establishing that Christians believe that God fully created the world and now sustains it. The texts we used were Gen 1:1, Job 38:4-7, Jeremiah 18:5-6, Psalm 74:12-17, and Colossians 1:15-17. We also got them to think about whether these verses meant Christians could or couldn’t believe in Evolution.
I found it was really key to look at what the Theory of Evolution actually is as well, as lots of the pupils didn’t really understand it. We looked at how it has been twisted to support some worldviews in history - communism, capitalism, racism and the skewed view of survival of the fittest that fuelled the First and Second World Wars.
Then we showed a video about Genesis 1 showing the order the Bible says things were created in, and compared it to a diagram of evolution and the order that says things would have happened.
As Amy said - the time for questions was priceless and it was here the young people had the opportunity to share what they thought, and ask questions. It was probably the lesson where i’ve answered ‘i don’t know’ the most, but they respected that a lot and used it themselves as we looked at some of the harder questions.
For the Y9 lessons we had a creative exercise where we got the class in groups to draw each stage of the Genesis account and then we made a timeline at the front.
It’s a tough topic, but when the classes get thinking, it’s a privilege to do the lesson!
Hope that helps in some way, drop me a message if you’d like me to point you to the video and other bits we used.
Adam
Someone’s just pointed me to this very wonderful looking resource: http://www.thewonderproject.co.uk/. It tackles your topic and gives some fab resources to use from different faith persectives (e.g. vox pops). The downside is that it costs £39.50, but by the looks of it is worth the money. I will feature this in the resource toolkit as it looks like something worth getting a hold of.
Hi. Thank you so much for your comments and suggestions. The Creation lesson went well on Friday. We invited them along to our C.U, which followed the lesson, for any further discussion and 5 came along.
Hi Yvette, that’s great! Hope things are going well. I just tried emailing you, but think I have the wrong email address. Is it possible for you to email me your address, there’s something I’d love to ask you. Cheers: .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address).