A hands-on approach to teaching children as young as 6 months to age 3 about God’s creations and love for us. Lessons are taught each Sunday morning in the nursery during 9:30a.m. worship celebration.

Welcome to the Early Christian Awareness Program. The ECA team is anxious to begin working with you and your child. A purposeful effort will be made to create a loving, secure, happy, and meaningful environment to enable these children to experience faith through God's love.

By beginning an Early Christian Awareness Program at First United Methodist Church, we have decided to adopt the aims and methods of modern educators in our teaching of religion. Since educators have agreed that all of a child's senses; awareness, reactions, and responses, and even emotions can be trained almost from the moment of birth. We start this training with our six-month old infants. Certainly, our responsibility is to teach the basic tenets of our faith to the children of our congregation. Even for a very young child, this faith begins with an awareness of self, personal value and the development of relationships with other children and adults, which leads to awe and wonder at all the God-created beauty of the world.

We strive to stimulate the child's perception by visual, auditory, and all sensory methods. For instance, we get the interest of the class on a toy, like a bird, then show it in flight and reproduce it's song or voice. We let the children touch it. Thus, they get a complete and comprehensive impression of the bird or other item we are domonstrating. "Touch it", "Taste it", "Smell it", are axiomatic to this type of education. The children "plant" flowers in a styrofoam block. A bee comes to land on the flowers.

Repetition, of course, is a keynote of teaching very young children. Each teacher follows a teaching routine in a small set of cards, and the entire routine is repeated each Sunday with only minor variations. The routine begins as soon as an aide places a baby in a chair at the teaching table. Then the teacher says, "Good morning. We are so glad you came to Church School today."

Constantly during a teaching session, the teacher assures each child, "I am glad to see you at Church today" and "God loves you." In the first song of the routine, the teacher holds up a mirror to each small child in the circle and sings, "God made you, God made you, God made you..."

In the class routine, many teaching toys are used. A mother bird with her babies, for example, is used to teach that God gives us mothers to take care of us, just as the baby birds have a mother to take care of them. Flip charts of the sun, moon, stars, trees, and oceans are used to teach the Creation story. There is a Bible on the table and constant repetition of the fact that God loves us and made us just as we are, and that we are in Church School, a pleasant, wonderful place where we can learn about God.

The routine varies with the toddlers where we strive for responses from the babies, but we continue to stimulate all of the child's senses. We continue to emphasize God's love and we recognize each child as an individual. The words God and love and the Bible are emphasized in class through repetition. The teacher repeatedly thanks God for each item used in every procedure.