Teaching and Learning About Our Prophets
One thing that has been made perfectly clear to me is
That the youth want to know about the Latter-Day prophets!
This year we reserved the last month of school for learning about the prophets and the students have been asked to be the teachers…
And when I asked them if they had a preference of which prophet they taught, they had a seriously hard time deciding and ultimately most of my students realized that they don’t care – they will teach any of them!
And then… when the day came to prepare, and they received their assignments and started studying their prophet, some of them realized that I had signed them up for a day that they wouldn’t there, and I actually had some of them change their plans – because they wanted to teach that prophet so badly!!!
So here is a little packet you could use in your classroom or in your home.
There are 2 prophets per page, and it is designed so that:
1- Each student is engaged the entire time even when they aren’t teaching
2- Everyone has something to take home
3- I can give them fun pop-quizes that they can use their notes for
And then I gave them this outline to help them prepare their lesson:
I am taking this opportunity to teach my students HOW to teach, not just WHAT to teach, and truthfully those are two very different skill sets.
Their first goal is to learn the WHAT, and in this case, the WHAT is details about the Prophets.
The next goal, is to brainstorm HOW to actually teach and involve the class in the learning process. I ask them to think about some of their favorite teachers and why they are their favorites. Inevitably, it is because they know WHAT to teach and HOW to teach it.
And those two things take years and years of practice, tweaking and perfecting. It is an art.
So here are some resources for you if you want to learn about the prophets too.
– The seminary website has student study guides which are a fabulous resource. Here is the one that teaches about the prophets. Brigham Young starts on page 165 and then they are in order after that.
– Grandpa Bill has a great website about all the Brethren you would ever want to know about.
I know that I’ve graduated from Seminary, more than a few years ago. But man, I would love to be in your class!
This will be so great to use for FHE. Thanks so much!