December Is the Month of Mercy

By Primary 2 Teacher, Yiseul Chung  

“Blessed are the merciful, for they shall receive mercy.” Matthew 5:7

In December, SJMS peace curriculum is focusing on the virtue of Mercy. As part of this week’s peace lesson, P2 students enjoyed a discussion about “What is Mercy?” and “the Mercy game.” It was fun and interactive way to help children begin to understand the virtue of Mercy.

As a class, we spent a good chunk of time, discussing “What exactly is mercy?” According to the P2 students, mercy meant…

"Being extra kind to someone." -Lilly "Being kind to your new neighbor." -Nick "Even when someone is being bad you let them off the hook because sometimes you know that they did not mean to do that." -Ian "Be nice even if they are doing something you don’t exactly like." -Nora "Inviting people to do something with you." -Atticus "Respect someone even if they don’t respect you." -Heidi

It was obvious that most students have heard the word before, but had hard time defining it. After a little discussion, we agreed that mercy is when we choose to be kind to someone, when we have the option to be mean. We also shared and contemplated on some examples of merciful moments that happened and could happen in the classroom.

We choose to be merciful to one another. We all want mercy in our lives and we want to be merciful people.

Then, we ended the lesson with the Mercy game. Here is how the game goes and this game can be played anywhere with all ages:

Pick three kids, one plays Mercy, the other two play Meanness. A child with the label Mercy stand at one end and this child acts as the goal in the game. He or she remains stationary like a statue. When you say go everyone will run to Mercy. Children wearing Meanness try to tag as many children as possible before they reach to Mercy. When a child is caught, a child is caught by meanness and has to sit down. When a child is about to get caught, they can cry “Have Mercy on me!” to avoid getting caught once. In the end some will make it to Mercy, some will get captured by Meanness.

Through the game children realized that many times in our lives we make mistakes and act in a mean way. However, when this happens you just apologize and ask for mercy. Let’s always run toward Mercy in our lives and try to keep away from Meanness.