Saint are Sinners Who Never Gave Up

How it goes:

1. Students walk in to somber chant music and respond to the journal prompt: How would you describe the saints? What words come to mind?

2. After responding to this prompt they share their answers with their small group and I walk around collecting their responses in a sneaky fashion as I plug them in to worditout.com word cloud. On this site the word cloud will make the words you enter more often appear bigger so students can see common themes.

3. I show the students their class's word cloud and we discuss their ideas of the saints. Here I try to emphasize how holy and different they think the saints are. It is important to make it really easy for students to be really honest about the saints. If they think the saints are weird or boring let them say it.

4. Next, I start handing out vice cards made from this template I made. I fold them in half so that only the vice is showing and the saint is on the inside and not visible to the students. I hand them out to each students and ask them if you have this vice if you can become a saint. For example one card says a drunkard so I ask, "Wow! Drunkard! Can you become a saint if you struggle with THAT!" The students usually agree and get really into it as I lay down more and more vices.

5. Finally at the end I have them open up their cards to reveal the saint on the inside. At this point I have them write down two quotes in their notebooks: "Saints are sinners who never gave up" and "Every Saint has a past and every sinner has a future."

6. We discuss these two quotes in the context of the saints we just revealed. At the end students go around the room to tour the saint cards and write down three that they want to research more to understand their story. We remake the word clouds to reflect what they have learned now and have a discussion on how Jesus, Grace, and Conversion are what makes a saint.

This lesson connects to the next lesson called: Conversion Limerick Version