Our Program serves children of all ages — infant through high school are welcome!

Nursery
Infants through age three can enjoy free play, music, snack, and story time guided by the Nursery Caregivers.

Rainbow Chapel

Our 9:15 am session will offer a new interactive, interage Children’s Chapel service for pre-k through 5th grades. Centered around the 7 UU Principles, students will spend a month with each principle, learning what it means, how to see it in the world, how to live it at the Fellowship and at home.  Weekly and monthly rituals will ground each service helping students to both know what to expect each week and be comfortable attending service. Two social action projects completed during the year will put “faith into action” and teach students how to act their values.

Curricula

Three traditional UU curricula are being for PreK through 8th grade: “Spirit Play”, “Faith Journeys”/”Moral Tales” and “Compass Points”. The programs cover major themes of Unitarian Universalist identity, social justice, earth stewardship and provide opportunities for worshipful reverence as well as incorporate arts and crafts, music, large body movement, cooperative activities, discussion, quiet times and meditation.

Spirit Play (pre-K through 2nd Grade)

Spirit Play is offered at 11 am for the PreK through 2nd grade group. Spirit Play is a Montessori-inspired approach to Unitarian Universalist Religious Education. The developers of this program saw “the purpose of religious education as helping children in living into their own answers to the existential questions: Where did we come from? What are we doing here? What is our purpose? How do we choose to live our lives? What are our gifts? How do we use them? What happens when we die? Why do we die? Why are we lonely and sad sometimes?”

“As in Montessori, the key elements are the classroom environment and the teachers. These elements free the children to work at their own pace on their own issues.”

The team teacher/guide is the “Storyteller” and the assistant is the “Door Keeper”. The “Door Keeper” greets the children and helps them get ready to enter the classroom as they come in. Using parables to connect children to Unitarian Universalism’s rich and diverse tradition, the “Storyteller” leads the circle in the story of the day, using props, followed by wondering. Children choose an art response or use a story previously heard, helped by the Storyteller or Door Keeper.

“Doorkeepers” are needed from all across the fellowship: parents, members without children in the program, and teens, all of whom have been attending for six months.

Faithful Journeys & Moral Tales (3rd through 5th Grades)

This year we’re offering two new curricula from the UUA Tapestry of Faith progrgam at 11 am. We’ll start the year with Faithful Journeys where participants embark on a pilgrimage of faith, exploring how Unitarian Universalism translates into life choices and everyday actions. In each session, they hear historic or contemporary examples of Unitarian Universalist faith in action. Stories about real people model how participants can activate their own personal agency – their capacity to act faithfully as Unitarian Universalists – in their own lives, and children have regular opportunities to share and affirm their own stories of faithful action. Through sessions structured around the Unitarian Universalist Principles, Faithful Journeys demonstrates that our Principles are not a dogma, but a credo that individuals can affirm with many kinds of action. Over the course of the program, children discover a unity of faith in the many different ways Unitarian Universalists, including themselves, can act on our beliefs.

We’ll finish the year with Moral Tales which attempts to provide children with the spiritual and ethical tools they will need to make choices and take actions reflective of their Unitarian Universalist beliefs and values. Stories such as the ones woven throughout Moral Tales can activate and inform children’s learning about how to make moral choices. Each session has a central story in which participants meet real and fictional heroes and heroines who have displayed moral courage and spiritual greatness. They will hear about characters who have struggled, but who have chosen justice, goodness, and love and learn how to create their own moral compass and make their own moral choices.

Amazing Grace (6th through 8th Grade)

Amazing Grace is a new curriculum from the UUA’s Tapestry of Faith program. We offer Amazing Grace at 11 am for junior high school students. Amazing Grace intends to help sixth graders understand right and wrong and act on their new understanding. Its purpose is to equip them for moving safely and productively through the middle- and high school years, when they will be continually tugged toward both ends of the ethics continuum. Through their involvement in Amazing Grace, youth will come to recognize and depend on their Unitarian Universalist identity and resources as essential to their movement toward understanding, independence, and fulfillment of personal promise.

Senior High Youth Group (grades 9 - 12)

The Senior High class has adopted the “Six Flames of the Chalice” for strong youth groups: Worship, Community Building, Social Action, Learning, Leadership, and Youth/ Adult Collaboration. Through the concept of youth empowerment and these six components, youth are encouraged to grow socially, spiritually, intellectually and to put our UU principles into action. The youth group meets on Sundays from 12:15 - 1:45 pm in the Old Stone Church. Visit the youth group page here.

Our Whole Lives We offer comprehensive, age appropriate sexuality education for 7th through 9th graders. For more information, click here.

Coming of Age Is our rite of passage program for high school freshmen and sophomores. For more information, click here.

For more detailed information please read the 09-10 RE Prospectus . To download a registration form, click here. For questions or other information, contact our Director of Lifespan Programs and Services, Kim Mason, at re at hunterdonuu.org or 908-996-3964.