Teaching The Holy Rosary as a Catechist’s Tool
Like many cradle Catholics, I went to the stereotypical Catholic grade school, complete with ruler wielding nuns. Every morning started with a Church service, and lessons were filled with rote memorizations of prayers, sacraments, and traditions. None of which filled me with as much dread and the rosary!
How could that be? The holy rosary is a beautiful devotional, with lessons, meaning, and tradition that spans over a millennium. Let’s see it through the eye’s of a squirmy kid in the 3rd grade.
Keep in mind, Catholic nuns in the 1970’s weren’t exactly interested in teaching the meaning and nuance of saying the rosary. It was a matter of learning your prayers word-for-word, and then saying them over-and-over-and-over again, as quickly as possible. It turned into a race, burning through the beads as quickly as possible. Yes, I know my traditional Catholic prayers, but I didn’t give their actual meaning any thought until well into adulthood. Actually I was forced to delve deeply, as many cradle Catholics do, preparing a catechism lesson.
THE HOLY ROSARY AS A CATECHISM TEACHING TOOL
As a catechist, I spent several years following the lesson books fairly closely. We would say the same opening and closing prayers with the hope that they would stick. There I was teaching rote memorization like the sisters many years prior. Eventually, I decided to get into the meaning of the prayers by having the kids break into groups, and each group would illustrate a section of the prayer we were studying. All of sudden, they were forced to visualize what they were saying.
That’s not to say the exercise was 100% successful. I was teaching 3rd graders at the time, and at that age (and arguably any age) some kids are better at visualizing than others. That eventually led me to illustrate prayers and other lessons in cartoony coloring pages and activities. All of a sudden, when praying the Hail Mary, they can see Mary being confronted by the Archangel Gabriel (Luke 1:28), and then celebrating with Elizabeth (Luke 1:42).
So why make them coloring pages? Imagine sitting a 3rd grader down and asking him or her to reflect on something. You are going to get a blank stare 9 times out of 10. Oh, the kid might pretend to focus for 10 seconds, and then fidget and look for any excuse to do something. Sit him or her down with a box of crayons, and then you’ll see some concentration. You can even offer some additional insight during the activity, and some of it (maybe just a little) might seep in.
Extend that type of activity to the entire rosary devotional, and stretch it over a school year, and you have the potential for an amazingly thorough curriculum. Yes, learning how to pray the rosary is enough, but it can be so much more!
ABOUT THE COMIC GUIDE TO THE HOLY ROSARY
This book collects my comic illustrations of the history of the rosary, the life of Holy Mary, traditional Catholic prayers, all 20 mysteries, and 4 separate rosaries to color to mark off each step. I suggest taking your time and spending at least 15 minutes of class throughout the school year. The lesson plan could look something like this…
Color and go over the history of the rosary.
Color and go over the life of Mary and the Hail Mary prayer. That will help connect the dots between the Hail Mary and Mary’s story. This will be further reinforced as you go over the mysteries.
Spend the next few classes coloring and going through the other prayers: Glory Be, Our Father, Fatima Prayer, Hail Holy Queen, and the Apostles’ Creed. The Creed will be further reinforced by the mysteries.
For each class afterward, go through a decade, coloring as you go of course, flip back to the prayer pages as makes sense, and color and reflect on each mystery. Because the mysteries are in chronological order, it tells the full story of Jesus and the formation of the Catholic Church.
The beauty of the Holy Rosary as a teaching tool is it sneaks in repetition, a powerful teaching method (those nuns did know their stuff after all!), visualization, and physical activity. The coloring also helps pick up where you left off at each lesson, and finish with a beautiful keepsake. On top of all of that, the instructions for how to pray the rosary drops off more-and-more with each subsequent rosary coloring page, so they actually might learn how to pray the rosary along with all the deeper meaning.
Pretty sneaky, eh? Learning the rosary, traditional Catholic prayers, the story of Mary and Jesus in one school year. The only thing missing is the blank stare.
