Catechising Young Children

My wife was just telling me at supper about walking down with the kids to the McDonnell's (another home-schooling family in our estate). My 6-year old son, Peter said to her out of the blue, "Mommy, God made me and everything. God made the world to glorify him. God is an invisible being who does not have a body like us." (My boys currently have a fascination with metaphysics.)

This is part of the joy of a fully-integrated Christian education. (But then it's nothing new. It's what my Mum and Dad got in their country church schools. By the way, the parents of a friend of mine thought they still taught the Shorter Catechism at primary school. Sadly not!)

Our children are learning "The Child's Catechism", which the RPCI uses in its Sabbath school programme and which is produced by the PCI. This provides a good grounding in basic Bible history (Q 1. Who was the first man? A. Adam), but it isn't until after 129 questions that it gets around to doctrine. So in parallel we initially used the excellent "Catechism for Young Children: An Introduction to the Shorter Catechism" produced by the PCA (original edition), but we have now swapped to Carine MacKenzie's "My First Book of Questions and Answers". This is an expansion of and improvement on the PCA's catechism.

May I heartily recommend it to you along with all that Carine MacKenzie has produced for CFP. We have used a lot of her materials in family worship. There are other "My First Book of..." books.

By the way, I'm glad that CFP don't have pictures of Christ, as far as I know.