In my years of teaching preschoolers in Sunday School I have found there are two essential ingredients for good teaching: enthusiasm and love for God—and for the class. I need to love God so much that I am prepared to spend time and effort to assure that the content of my teaching is spiritually inspired. I need to love my class enough to give thought and prayer to their spiritual ability, their identity with God. This enables each pupil to participate vitally in the good unfolding so joyfully for us each Sunday.
I follow Mrs. Eddy's directive in the Church Manual (Art. XX, Sect. 3) about the children's first lessons—the Ten Commandments, the Lord's Prayer and its spiritual interpretation, and the Beatitudes in the Sermon on the Mount. I base my teaching on these, taking one or more Sundays to cover the salient points in each one and searching always for fresh ideas that will show my pupils how exciting it is to use the truths we are talking about. I include related ideas from the Lesson-Sermon and sometimes from testimonies given at Wednesday evening meetings. We talk about the children's articles in the Sentinel, and I encourage the pupils to share with us their own experiences in using the truths they are taught.
A child in this age-group sometimes has a worry—a cut, a hurt, a sick pet, or even a pet that has died. He wants to know why, but he invariably poses his query as a bald statement: "I have a cut on my finger" or "My sister is in bed and she is sick." I always take the opportunity to talk about these problems, because these are what the children have to face up to, and they need to know the answers.
