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Religious Education for Children and Youth
Children are welcome to participate in our Religious Education (R.E.) programs even if their parents are not members of our church. Our R.E. program for children and youth runs concurrently with our Sunday service, which starts at 10:30 a.m. Paul Cirré (pictured at right) is our part-time Director of Religious Education (DRE).
Our Director of Religious Education (DRE), Paul Cirré, led a workshop on April 5, 2008 to evaluate the current Religious Education (RE) program and decide what to keep and what to let go of in order to develop an ideal program.
The vision workshop concentrated on the following issues:
- Look at the past and current program, and decide what to keep and what to let go
- Imagine an ideal program and brainstorm what changes need to be made and what things have to be added to realize a new vision
- Roles and responsibilities of individuals and groups
Paul believes there is nothing more important this year than setting new goals as well as a new vision for the department which will help to make our department as vibrant and healthy as ever.
The 2007-2008 Religious Education (R.E.) program at First Universalist has four classes which run during the Sunday service. The children and youth participate in the first portion of the Sunday service and are then sung out to go to their classrooms.
The youngest class, made up of pre-school, 1st and 2nd graders, has been exploring differences this year through the UU program, We Are Many, We Are One. They've discussed different preferences such as favorite colors and recently finished a dicussion of differences between boys and girls, women and men. They were asked, "Who in your family cleans the house?" and in this good UU congregation, we had some pretty creative answers.
The two middle classes (3rd & 4th graders and 5th, 6th and 7th graders) are focusing on Bible stories, including Faces of God. In a recent class, the 5th, 6th and 7th graders had a visitor who had been ice fishing. They swapped fishing stories and tied it in with Noah's ark and other flood stories, including an Indian myth about a great fish who saved people in a similar fashion to Noah and the ark, and then tied this into descriptions of Jesus, the fisherman.
The high school class (aka YRUU for Young Religious Unitarian Universalists, there's a national YRUU website) encompasses grades 8 - 12. This class picks topics for discussion rather than follow a set curriculum. This year, they have attended two cons (conventions), one in Rochester, one in Buffalo. They painted their classroom and played a large part in the December Mummers' play. They have been dyeing wool to make mittens and scarves for the RAIHN program (Rochester Area Interfaith Hospitality Network, see our Social Justice page for more details). The class is busy preparing for a bridging ceremony in June for three students who are seniors, who are busy passing down YRUU traditions to the younger YRUUers.
During the 2007-2008 year, our Religious Education (R.E. or sometimes RE) Committee has been working on updating the program's mission statement and identifying curriculum for the next church year. It is possible the next year will see a focus on the UU principles for the younger children and on UU history for the older classes.
The committee prefers to think of the RE program as closer to summer camp than to school and would like to empahsize the fun.
Our Director of Religious Education (DRE), Paul Cirré came to us in the fall of 2006 after a short-lived retirement.
A native of Rochester, Paul is an only child who grew up in the suburbs of Greece and Irondequoit. He attended Irondequoit High School and, at the time of his graduation, was the first student from that school to be admitted to Georgetown University in Washington DC. He spent two years in Georgetown at the Institute of Language before transferring to the University of Rochester, where he later graduated with a double degree in psychology and Spanish.
Cirré spent the next several years teaching in schools in the Rochester area and at an inner city high school in San Antonio, Texas.
Self-taught on computers, he also worked as both a computer expert and technical writer at General Electric, among other corporations.
The fall of 2008 saw Paul begin a ministerial program at Colgate Rochester Divinity School. His philosophy: "Every day I keep on trying....If I wake up in the morning, then I know it is going to be a good day....I love life!"
Now we begin to understand why it was a short retirement.
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