Summer is winding down and kids all over Northern Virginia have returned to school. That means that NOVES Sunday School Classes will be resuming soon too! Sunday, September 8th is our first Platform of the 2019/2020 School Year. WE HOPE YOU CAN JOIN US!
If you are new to the Northern Virginia Ethical Society or you haven’t visited in awhile, you may be wondering what kids do on Sunday morning? Our mission as a school community is to promote ethical behavior through educational experiences, including and social activism, so that students will become good world citizens. Children are in the main room for opening words, music and a Story For All Ages. Then the Sunday School heads to the classrooms to begin their lessons.
This year, younger children will be taking a class Called “Everyday is Earth Day”. This class uses experiments, crafts and hands-on activities to teach that every day is a day to think about taking care of our Earth. In this class children learn about conserving energy, how all creatures serve a purpose on Earth, reducing & recycling, and the frailty of ecosystems.
Students in 5th grade and up will be taking a 2 part class that hopes to educate them to make informed and reasonable decisions called “Media Literacy/Ethical Conundrums”. Our pre-teens are exposed to all kinds of messages coming from media outlets, advertisers and peers. This class helps them become more able to analyze the veracity of those messages, as well as the intentions of the creators of the messages. It also gives them a chance to discuss and role play how they would ethically handle a difficult situation involving peer pressure and social media.
In addition to classes, we undertake one group service project per month. This year, we will be learning about Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs in conjunction with our service projects. These Service Lessons aim to teach our children how to recognize and differentiate levels of need. We can only “act so as the elicit the best in others” by taking the time to meet an individual at their level of emotional development. Children will get to participate in 5 projects that exemplify the 5 individual levels of the Needs Pyramid. We will be making lunches for the Embry Rucker Homeless Shelter, Trick or Treating for our Troops thru Operation Gratitude, raising money to fund a school in Africa thru the sale of hand drawn class valentines, and collecting old markers for Crayola Recycling from now until Earth Day We are also expanding our service program to include a monthly volunteer Sunday School Clean Up Crew. Students will be responsible for platform breakdown, cleanup and trash removal on the last platform of every month.
I also have plans to get our creative juices flowing again this year! The NOVES Puppeteers will be performing Stone Soup at The Stone Salad festival in November. And the students will be performing some musical selections for the society again on Darwin Day in February.
I hope that you are all as excited about the upcoming year as I am. Our children learn invaluable skills and lessons at NOVES. And they build strong friendships and supportive peer groups. If you have any questions about our Ethical Education here at Northern Virginia Ethical Society, please contact me at DEE@noves.org and I will be happy to assist you.
SEE YOU SUNDAY!
