Every November, Catholic teachers look for creative ways to get their students to appreciate and understand the lives of the saints. Do any of these sound familiar?
- saint reports
- a saints wax museum
- saint posters
This November, if you’re looking for something new, consider having your students
perform a reader’s theater. Diana Jenkins’ book Spotlight on Saints! (Pauline Books & Media) contains twelve humorous reader’s theater scripts for students in grades 4-8. In each script, a saint helps a modern student with a real-life problem. In one play, St. Gianna Molla helps a young girl learn to prioritize the activities of her busy life. In another, St. Martin de Porres shows a young man how to find God in everyone.
The featured saints include well-known men and women like St. Therese of Lisieux and St. Paul, as well as lesser known luminaries such as St. Andrew Kim Daegeon and St. Bakhita.
Each play begins with a summary, a list of optional props, a cast of characters and a brief biography of the featured saint. With twelve scripts available, you can even stretch the project out over the year by having students present a new reader’s theater each month.
Parade of Saints
If reader’s theater isn’t quite your thing, here’s yet another creative way of bringing the saints to life in your school:
In my class I usually act out events in saints lives, such as Max Kolbe, Isaac Jogues and Fr. Damien. You should see the kids’ faces when I’m the SS officer walking among their ranks, picking those to be starved to death. When St. K volunteers to replace one of them, they are quite thankful.
It’s also no accident that the Saints are men facing physical danger. The boys tend to regard saints as women or nerds or sissies (St. Francis patting bunnies on the head), so portraying some fearless robust guys shows them it ain’t necessarily so.
Saints wax museum? I have to admit that’s a new idea to me. Do you have more details on that?
I’ve found that telling the stories of martyrs works particularly well with junior high groups.
The saints wax museum is like some other wax museum projects where students choose an important figure from history, learn about his or her life, and prepare a short presentation in which they act as the person. On a special day, all the students dress up as their historical figures and present their speeches to an audience of parents and other students. A saints wax museum would, of course, feature saints as the historical figures. Here are a few links if you want to learn more:
An example of a history wax museum from YouTube
A saints wax museum syllabus for 5th graders from St. Patrick’s Catholic School in Elkhorn, Nebraska. (Microsoft Word document)
A sixth grade “Hall of Scientists” research project from Forest Ridge Elementary School School District in Illinois