Profile of a Communion 1 Child

Children of this age are growing away from egocentric social behaviour toward an awareness of other people. They are entering into peer-group activities with zest. Now they need guidance in learning to handle playtime conflicts and to exercise the social skills needed to establish and maintain friendships.

These skills include learning to give and take and to share responsibility with peers; learning appropriate gender-sex identification; learning to read and to write, and other related intellectual skills.

They are capable of understanding a story and can retell it from beginning to end. Some are even capable at this stage of finding hidden meaning or discovering the moral in a story.

The children’s sense of self-worth is quite fragile at this stage. It is imperative that the catechist be sensitive to this fragility. When a child fails it is the behaviour rather than the child that needs to be corrected. This correction should be handled in such a way that the child’s emerging self-image is not damaged or hurt.