By Mary Kizior
No matter what class you teach, questions on human dignity and respect will likely arise. (Even in a math class, you might find yourself fielding questions about population growth and the economics of abortion!) Negative messages from the media and the culture of death bombard students on a daily basis, so students look to trusted adults for answers to life’s most fundamental questions. We want you to be prepared to guide your students with the right materials.
Now before you think you have to change your entire curriculum or spend your hard-earned money on materials you can’t use, here are a few things you should know about the Culture of Life Studies Program and pro-life education:
CLSP doesn’t replace your current curriculum.
Yes, you read that right. The Culture of Life Studies Program is a collection of unit studies, short courses, and supplemental educational materials meant to help you slowly integrate pro-life education into your classroom. CLSP is not an entire program of books and materials that you have to purchase right now. Instead, you choose whatever part of our program best suits the needs of your classroom—whether that’s a printed unit study like Life Is Precious or a downloadable lesson from our online library.
In our sales department, we often receive requests to purchase the “whole CLSP program.” It’s incredible for us to see so much enthusiasm for pro-life education, but a whole pro-life curriculum is not our mission. We’re never going to write a pro-life math book, for example, but we want to support teachers by giving them tools they can use to teach pro-life topics while still meeting their education standards.
Our program is meant to be flexible and adaptable to a variety of educational settings. Our lesson library on our website or our supplements like Giving with a Happy Heart: Teaching the Culture of Life in Charles Dickens’ “A Christmas Carol” make it easy for you to spend a few classes or even part of a class talking about pro-life topics and teaching students how to live in a way that respects the dignity of each person.
CLSP unit studies such as Life Is Precious do not have to be completed from front to back. You might choose to spend a week during Respect Life Month learning about a preborn baby’s development and then learn about standing up for others during the week of January 22 (as you talk about the March for Life). The units do build upon each other, but it isn’t necessary to do them all at the same time if your schedule does not allow it.
Pro-life education is not an “extra” class.
It’s too hard to also teach a “pro-life class” to your students when you already have so much other equally important material to cover. The best way to teach pro-life topics in the classroom is to extract key pro-life themes in the material that you are already teaching. That’s where most teachers get stuck. Finding the pro-life themes in any given subject can be a challenge. What teacher has time to do that?
The Culture of Life Studies Program fills in the gaps for teachers and helps them substitute our culture of life unit studies for classes they are already teaching—like using our Life Is Precious unit study during kindergarten storytime or one of our literature unit studies in a high school English class.
All CLSP materials are tools to help teachers introduce pro-life materials into any kind of classroom setting. We want our materials to integrate seamlessly into subjects that teachers are already approaching in the classroom so that the pro-life message doesn’t have to take up additional teaching time.
Respect for the dignity of each person should be a central theme in every class you teach your students—whether you are a history teacher, homeschooling parent, or youth minister. Our lessons on marriage, euthanasia, and pro-life heroes all fit well into your daily program and will help your children learn about the sanctity of life. Pro-life education is imperative in today’s society. We cannot let it fall by the wayside.
Right now, during the quarantine, ALL of our downloadable materials are FREE. Just visit our store, browse our lessons, and choose what you’d like! It’s that simple. This is our gift to you during these difficult times.
Mary Kizior is the product development and marketing manager for the Culture of Life Studies Program. Her work has appeared on LifeSiteNews.com, Christ Is Our Hope magazine, Celebrate Life Magazine, Defend Life magazine, the Peanut Butter and Grace blog, and other blogs.
This article has been reprinted with permission and can be found at cultureoflifestudies.com.
