Well, it has been one year since I launched The Religion Teacher. It has been a great experience and I am thankful for the opportunity to share my thoughts and ideas with you. Since the first post in March 2009, I have shifted my focus away from news and web reviews to pedagogy and practical…
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Religious Education and Catechesis Blogs
As I promised on the Catechetical Leader Podcast (episode #2), here is the list of catechetical blogs that I have found and followed over the past year. If I missed one that you have created or that you follow, please submit it as a comment or email me. I know the list is overwhelming so…
Web Tools to Help You Stay Organized
What is your method of organization? Have you made the digital jump yet? Growing up and even into college, I carried around a “planner” writing down meetings, assignments, tasks, to-dos, etc. I was lost without it. Today things are different. I recently had to get a new computer and I realized my entire life is…
Bell Work Activities – They Save Time and Keep Students Engaged
There is nothing like the sound of students working hard on an assignment the minute class has begun. What is that sound? Silence. I loved it. I was able to recover from the class that just ended and prepare for the class that was beginning all while students were learning on their own. In this…
A New Job, A New Adventure
People often say that your vocation is where your greatest passion meets the world’s greatest need. If this blog isn’t a dead give-away, I love teaching religion. I have an insatiable desire to learn everything I can about the Catholic faith and share that love with others. On one restless night of my junior year…
Teacher’s Reading List Ideas for Christmas Break
Christmas break is a great time to step back away from teaching and enjoy your time off. You may be looking for some good books to read or maybe you are looking to use some gift certificates from your students before you lose them. The following books rocked my socks off in 2009 and if…
Why is the third Sunday of Advent pink? (Why is the third candle in the Advent wreath pink?)
I inevitably got this question from my students during the 3rd week of Advent. So what is the best way to answer it? You could Google it and find a number of reasons: Purple is a penitential color of fasting while pink (rose) is the color of joy. The 3rd Sunday in Advent is Gaudete…
Visualizing God in Prayer and Guided Meditations
When you pray, how do you imagine God? Do you visualize someone or something? Do you use images to help you pray? Too often we tend to focus on what we are praying for rather than the God to whom we pray. If you ask your students what they imagine when they pray, you may…
Using the "New Taxonomy" to Design and Assess Educational Objectives
In September I posted a brief overview of Bloom’s Taxonomy, something I have used to develop lesson objectives since I first became a teacher. Since that post, I have spent a lot of time reading about Robert Marzano’s “New Taxonomy.” On a plane trip to New York, I found myself captivated by Marzano and John…
Review Games – All Play and No Work?
Is it a waste of time to play review games to prepare for tests? “I pray thee, spare thyself at times: for it becomes a wise man sometimes to relax the big pressure of his attention to work” (Augustine, Music, ii, 15). St. Thomas Aquinas uses this quote from St. Augustine to respond to the…