Celebrating Connections

Perspective
In the following activity, students will look at religious traditions and celebrations to find common understanding and real differences. As students encounter diverse beliefs they can begin to see differences, not in isolation, but in relationship to one another.

Materials

• Copies of the homework assignment sheet, Celebrating Our Lives [1] (PDF), to be completed with parents/guardians (includes a completed sample)
• Books, photographs and access to websites featuring a variety of religious holidays and traditions 

Suggested Procedures
Assign the Celebrating Our Lives home activity. Plan discussion to encourage a diversity of responses.

Teachers should divide students into diverse groups, or pair students, to share highlights from their Celebrating Our Lives handouts. Ask students to identify traditions that they share and traditions that are unique to their families.

Introduce stories, information and images from various world religions and ask students to guess the religion represented.

Divide the class into small groups and assign each group a religion to research (teachers should consider assigning religions with which students are unfamiliar). Each group should prepare a presentation for the class identifying the religion's main symbol(s), key figure(s), special text(s), place(s) of worship, key holiday(s) and a short paragraph about basic beliefs.

Allow adequate time for students to conduct research, discuss their findings and prepare presentations for the class.

After presentations, help the class identify ways the faith traditions are similar. Then ask the students to list things they didn't know and found interesting.

As a culminating activity, students should review their Celebrating Our Lives handouts and draw either from their own religious traditions or from the religions featured in the class activity to make a Comparative Religions Venn Diagram [2] (PDF). In the outer circles, write details telling how religions are different, and, where the circles overlap, describe ways religions are alike. Analyze and write conclusions about the comparisons. Have a whole class discussion about conclusions.

 

This activity is adapted from the BBC's Directory of World Religions [3].