A Good Relationship Starts with Good Communication!
Each year RE plans “Living Our Values Every Day” (LOVED) programming for our 2nd to 8th graders. On four Sundays over the course of the year we examine a specific topic. We looked at mindfulness and service to church and community in the last two years.
This year our focus will be on Compassionate or Nonviolent Communication (NVC), which Marshall Rosenberg, founder of NVC, explains is “interested in learning that is motivated by reverence for life, by a desire to learn skills, to contribute better to our own well-being and the well-being of others.” This idea honors our first UU principle of “respecting the inherent worth and dignity of every person.” Our LOVED program this year will look to help our children build skills around empathy, observing judgments, and identifying universal human needs. Our first two sessions will begin this month.
Along with discussing nonviolent communication in our LOVED program, RE is looking to improve overall communication for parents, teachers, and the congregation. For parents, we started the year out with a “Welcome to RE” letter and throughout the year they can check the weekly enews for what’s happening each week in the classroom. For teachers, we have implemented a new email communication that includes links to the curriculum materials they are teaching each week as well as a spiritual preparation activity. For the congregation, we will be changing the bulletin board monthly and preparing monthly newsletter articles like this one and weekly enews updates.
If you have any ideas on how the RE program can best communicate with your and/or your family, please email me at dre@uucantonny.org.
Carol Zimmerman, Director of Religious Education