Suggestions for Using REC-Room

	Suggestions for Use

Note to Religious Education Professionals and other RE leaders: This site was designed to help you with your very important job of organizing a lifespan religious education program. This site could also be helpful to homeschoolers, other parents who would like to provide religious education at home, and other types of educators. To inform your teachers about this site, we have created fliers and bookmarks for you to print and distribute.

Here is a list of things you can get from this site:

Curricula descriptions for planning the up-coming season's classes
General comments about curricula that will help you decide whether or not they are appropriate for your classes or how you might need to adapt them
Ideas for supplemental classes or special sessions, eg. your summer session
Ideas to develop your own curriculum
Book suggestions to replace out-dated ones suggested in current curricula
Book suggestions for planning library purchases
Book suggestions to further your own knowledge of religious education
Web site suggestions to find resources for classes, worship services, or to further your own knowledge
Worship & story ideas for either children's or intergenerational worship
Tips to help your teachers and you with class problems or dealing with special situations
Ideas for holidays and other special celebrations (the site is searchable, so just search on the term, such as the name of the holiday)
Curricula comments and resource suggestions for the classroom that the teachers could use all year round
You, your teachers and other volunteers can add comments and resources, so there is a continuously growing amount of information available to all religious educators here
Searching for all things RE - we hope in the future to include a search function that also indexes other RE sites besides this one; there may already be more than one site indexed in our current search program - check it out. Our site search is indexed once per week on Fri. night.

Also please note the additional resources of UUCARDS (curricula writers) and UURE.

Ideally every teacher in your program will go to their home computers on Sunday night and access this site to put in comments about what they taught that day (or whatever day they were teaching), and then they'll check others' comments to help them in their preparation for their next class. The ideal is not expected, though, for several reasons: 1) lack of volunteer time since our teachers are often already using up what little spare time they have, 2) lack of home computers - realistically it will be many years before every home has one and even then some of our members will decline to own one, and 3) if everyone is logged in on Sunday night, they are not likely to be able to get through to the site.

Many Religious Educators provide their teachers with an evaluation sheet for every class. This sheet could then be used to transfer the information to REC-Room. If the teachers cannot do it themselves, a volunteer could be recruited to do it. Depending on the size of your program, you may want a volunteer for each age grouping or one for classes for children/youth and one for adult classes, or just one for the entire program. Since this is an important resource, you or an assistant could do it as you presently file other resources, but hopefully you can find volunteers who can do it for you.

This site will hopefully also be a good resource for books, both for professional reading and for stories for children, teacher orientations, special events (such as family/intergenerational retreats), and worship services. In order to be an optimal resource, we need as much input to it as possible. Please remember after using new materials or designing something special for your congregation that you can share that information with other religious educators here on this site. The more people do that, the more information there will be for you when you're looking for something.

If you are a curriculum writer, this site will be a great resource to you. It will give you ideas for new curricula, feedback on present curricula for future updates, and a resource to find field testers and announce your new curriculum. We hope for every idea you get that you'll also share one. This site is not meant to take the place of well-developed, field-tested curricula. We hope you will find it very useful.

Please note: REC-Room is a grassroots effort and not a department of the UUA. If you would like to be a sponsor or volunteer, please let us know.

Web site development by Dowling Web Design.
Server space provided as a public service by UUism Networks.