Teaching Apologetics to Children: A Parent's Guide

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In this episode, we tackle the important question of how to teach apologetics to children under eight. Elizabeth Urbanowicz explores practical strategies for helping young kids understand and defend their faith through concrete, symbolic, and abstract stages of learning. Tune in to discover how to equip your children with a strong foundation in the Christian worldview.

Transcript

Note: The following is an auto-transcript of the podcast recording.

Hello friends. Today's question says, "How does one teach apologetics to children under the age of eight?" Such an important question for us to think through because if we want to equip our kids to carefully evaluate every idea and understand the truth of the Christian worldview, we have to equip them to understand a rational defense for the Christian faith. Today we're going to dive down deep into exploring how can we teach apologetics concepts to children under the age of eight. Before we do that, if you have not met me before, my name is Elizabeth Urbanowicz and I'm the host of the Foundation Worldview Podcast where our goal is to answer your questions so that you can equip the children that God has placed in your care to carefully evaluate every idea they encounter and understand the truth of the biblical worldview. Now, as we think through this question, how can we teach apologetics concepts to young children?

The first thing we need to do is make sure that any instruction that we are given aligns with God's design of the child mind, that this should be a question we're consistently asking ourselves. Is what I'm doing with this child or with these children, does it align with the process that God has put in place for normal healthy child development? Because that's so important that we align everything we're doing with our creator's design, and that's what we're constantly doing here at Foundation Worldview. For those of you who have taken your children through one or more of our curriculums, you know that at each different stage for ages four plus, eight plus, and 10 plus, we're consistently seeking to look at, okay, what is the developmental stage these children will be in? What has God designed for this stage and how can we meet children where they're at in their God-given stage of development to help them understand these concepts?

So when we're thinking specifically of children under the age of eight, and we're thinking about where they are at developmentally and then how to teach them abstract concepts, there's a really simple three-step formula that we can use, and it's a three-step formula that we try to use in our Foundation Worldview curriculums, especially for the ages of four through eight. And so these three different developmental stages in learning are the concrete stage, the symbolic stage, and the abstract stage. So I'll say that again. Concrete stage, symbolic stage, and abstract stage. Now, this is something that I think probably most of us have already experienced in our own lives.

Think about when you were first learning addition as a child, either when you were in pre-K or kindergarten or first grade, you were not just given a verbal math fact. No teacher or parent said to you, what is three plus four? Because when you're four or five or six years old, the word three, the concept three means nothing to you. The word four, the concept four means nothing to you. So the first thing that your parents or your teachers did was they took out blocks or some other physical object, and they would give you three of those blocks and you would play with them and you would touch them, and then they would help you count them, 1, 2, 3, okay? And then they would give you four blocks and you'd get to play with them, and then they'd help you count them and you count 1, 2, 3, 4. And after you understood these physical objects that this is a group of three, this is a group of four, then they would push those objects together and say, okay, here we have three blocks here, we have four blocks. Let's see how much they are all together. And then they would help you count 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7. And so that was the first stage, the concrete stage where you actually had something physical.

After that, your parents or teachers moved you into the symbolic stage that once you could look at those blocks and count them and push them together and then count them all together, then they would attach a symbol to those physical objects. So they would take out the three blocks, and then they would draw the number three on a paper or a chalkboard or a whiteboard, and then they would say, this is the number three, and you would count the blocks, 1, 2, 3, and then eventually they would have you draw the number three. Then they would do the same thing with four. They would take out the four blocks, you would touch them, you would count them, and then they would draw the symbol for four. And so eventually as you were moving from the concrete stage to the symbolic, you could eventually recognize the symbol for three, the symbol for four. Eventually you could recognize the symbol for addition, the symbol for equal, and so you had moved into the symbolic stage. Then once you had mastered that symbolic stage, when you could look at the symbols to represent three plus four equals and you knew that it equals seven and could write that down.

Then they would move you into the abstract stage where someone could just call out and say, okay, three plus four, what is three plus four? Now, you might still need your fingers to add it up, but you could visualize in your mind, okay, this is the number three, this is the number four. When I push those two numbers together, what are they? So those are the three stages that we need to take our children through the concrete stage, the symbolic stage, and the abstract stage. And so I'm going to take you now through two examples that we use in our Foundation Worldview curriculums and that you can use with the children God has placed in your care to take them through these three stages.

Now, before we do that, just ask that if you have found the content of this podcast beneficial, please make sure that you like and subscribe so that you don't miss any future episodes. And we'll also ask that you just do us a favor of investing the two seconds that it takes to rate this content so that we can continue equipping more Christian adults with the skills they need to get their kids thinking carefully. Also, if you have a question that you would like for me to answer on a future Foundation Worldview podcast, you can submit that by going to FoundationWorldview.com/podcast.

Okay, so now we're going to look at how can we take some important apologetic and theological concepts and go through these three stages, the concrete, symbolic, and abstract with our little ones. So one really important concept to cover with kids as we're wanting to teach them truth from Scripture, truth from the world around them is actually the concept of truth. Because they first have to be grounded in the understanding that truth is objective, truth is outside of them. And so now most kids, unlike when we're coming to mathematics and understanding the concepts of three and four, most kids already understand some basics of the concept of truth because they're consistently told you need to tell the truth and not lie. So when we're talking about the concept of truth with kids for the concrete part, we need to make sure that we have their bodies involved. And so those of you who have taken your little ones through our Biblical Worldview curriculum, you know that what we do, the first thing that we do is after we explain to them that truth is what is real, we say, okay, we're going to tell you some sentences. Some of the sentences are going to be true, and if those sentences are true, we want you to hold up your arms and shout "true". Some of the sentences will not be true. They'll be silly sentences. So then we want you to cross your arms and say, not true. So this gets their bodies involved. So it's actually attaching a physical movement onto the concept of truth and a physical movement onto the concept of something that is not true. Then we take them through a whole bunch of sentences. So if you do not have our Biblical Worldview curriculum yet, you can still do this activity with the kids in your care, just think of a bunch of sentences that are true or not true.

Also, if you would, just like some examples of this, if you go onto the Foundation Worldview website and request a sample, you can get the first two lessons in this curriculum for free. And so you can actually take your kids through these videos that will teach them in a very concrete way, concrete, physical way, the concept of truth versus not truth. Okay? So that's the first stage, the concrete stage.

Then moving on to the symbolic stage. What we do then next in the curriculum is there are accompanying activity sheets where we give them pictures of things that represent truth and pictures of things that do not represent truth, and we also give them an opportunity of a picture to draw a picture that represents something that is true. So we're taking these concrete, physical movements from their bodies of true versus not true, and then we're giving them an opportunity to look at some symbolic pictures that represent things that are true or are not true, and give them an opportunity to draw something as well. And so again, this is something that you can do with your kids, that once you've gone through the true and not true sentences, you can then say, okay, now we're going to draw pictures to show things that are true or pictures to show things that are not true. So that is the symbolic stage.

Then moving into the abstract stage, this is where on our activity sheets, we just have a number of sentences that parents are to read to their kids, and their kids are to identify whether the sentence is true or not true. Okay? So that's how we move from the concrete to the symbolic to the abstract in the concept of truth.

Another concept that we want our little to understand is just the character and nature of God, and one of the foundational understandings we need to have of God is that God is triune. He is one being in three persons. And so this is a concept that is very confusing to explain to kids because it is very abstract. It's hard even for us as adults to grasp, but if we can take our kids through some very basic things in these three stages, the concrete, the symbolic, and the abstract, we can help them have a much firmer grasp of what it means that God is three and one. And so in our Biblical Worldview curriculum, what we do to teach this is we tell kids specifically that God three is one being and three persons. So we say God is three in one, and then what we do is we look at physical objects that people sometimes use to compare to the trinity, but actually lead into heresies. Now, we don't say the word heresies with our little ones that would be too conflicts of a word to go through with them, but we say, okay, so we hold up an apple and say, some people say that God is like this apple because the apple has the core and the flesh and the skin, but an apple is not like God because God is not three different parts that make up one whole. So we show them the apple, we show them the skin, the core, the flesh, and say, this is not like God because God is not three parts that make up one whole, that the Father is fully God, the Spirit is fully God, the Son is fully God. So then we show them a picture of water, and we say, some people say that God is kind of like water, that sometimes water is liquid water, and sometimes water is frozen water called ice, and sometimes water is vapor called steam. But this is not like God because God doesn't have three different modes. He isn't sometimes the father, sometimes the son, and sometimes the spirit, the father is always the father, and the son is always the son, and the spirit is always the spirit and the Father is God, and the Son is God, and the Spirit is God. So we hold up these two objects, the apple and then the pitcher of water to give them these concrete examples, and then we recommend that parents let kids actually have an apple and touch it, maybe even eat it, and then talk about how is this apple different from God so that they're seeing something physical.

Then the next step that we move them into in the curriculum is we play a game where they have to identify how something is different than God. And if something is three parts that make up one whole, we have them hold up three fingers. Or actually I think we have them hold up just a whole hand just to show separate parts, and then if something is three different modes, we have them move their hands kind of like a wiggle to show that it's different than God because God isn't three different modes. And so we'll give examples of things like a tree, that there's the roots in the tree, there's the bark on the tree, and there's the leaves on the tree. How is this different than God? Oh, this is different parts that make up a whole, but God is not three different parts that make up a whole. Then we'll give them an example, something like ice cream that I sometimes ice cream is solid when it's frozen, and sometimes it's a liquid when it's not frozen. How is this different than God? Well, this is different modes. God isn't different modes. The Father is always God, the Son is always God. The Spirit is always God.

Then what we do to move them after that symbolic stage into the abstract state is, sorry, abstract stage is in the activity sheets. We give them descriptions of different objects, and then they have to explain how that object is not like God. So by going from the concrete to the symbolic to the abstract, we can help little ones understand deep truth.

Now, when we're thinking specifically about how to do this with apologetics topics, I'm going to give one example of a typical apologetics concept to cover with kids and how we could take them through these three stages. So those of you who are familiar with apologetics are probably familiar with an argument called the Kalam cosmological argument, and this is a syllogism. So it's two statements that are then used to draw a conclusion. So the first statement in this syllogism is everything that begins to exist has a cause. Second statement is the universe began to exist, and then the conclusion drawn. The third statement is, therefore the universe has a cause. So I'll take us through that again. First statement, everything that begins to exist has a cause. Second statement, the universe began to exist, and then the conclusion draw on the third statement. Therefore, the universe has a cause. And so this is just a simple argument that we can help our little ones understand to help them see, oh, actually the evidence in the world around us points to the fact that the universe had a cause and therefore something or someone had to cause the universe.

Okay. So what we can do to help our little ones understand this is first, we can gather physical objects around the room. So this is the concrete stage, and we can ask them, okay, what caused this? So if we gather a little plant, say, what caused this? Well, it was the seed that was planted in the ground caused this plant to grow. Okay? If we look at, we can take some water out of the faucet, put it in a glass and say, okay, look at this water. What caused this water? And then it might need to be a little bit older kids to understand this, but to understand the water cycle and that the clouds condense, and then the rain falls, and then the water comes through our pipes, and we can have a glass of water. You can hold up a picture of yourself or a picture of your kids and say, okay, what caused this? How did we come to be? We'll, take some mommy and a daddy to cause a human child. You can make your kids a peanut butter and jelly sandwich and say, okay, what caused this? Well, I caused this. I'm the one who created this peanut butter and jelly sandwich. So this is the concrete stage, and we can then say, okay, we saw that everything that started to exist has a cause. Okay? I needed a mom and a dad in order to exist, okay? This peanut butter and jelly sandwich needed someone to make it in order to exist. This plant needed a seed in order to exist. This glass of water needed clouds to come together and form rain droplets in order for us to have water. Okay? So that is the first stage, the concrete stage.

Then we can have our kids as they move into the symbolic stage, have them draw a picture of something that caused something else to say, okay, I want you to think about an object or a person or an animal, and then draw a picture of who or what caused this. Your kids can draw a picture of maybe a Lego tower, and they caused that to be built in your living room, or you can draw a picture of a flower outside or can draw a picture of a house. It was caused by a construction crew. And then just talk through, okay, so we know that everything that began to exist has a cause. Okay? So they understand that from a concrete perspective.

Now, from a symbolic perspective, now you're going to want to take it to the abstract perspective. That's where you can say, well, the universe where we live, we live in this state or in this country. We live on this continent. We live on planet Earth. Planet earth is in our solar system, which is in the Milky Way galaxy, which is part of the whole entire universe. So the universe began to exist, so that means the universe has a cause. And so then we can take them through this three-part, syllogism, and say, okay, everything that begins to exist has a cause. The universe began to exist, therefore, the universe has a cause. So if we can take our kids systematically through these three different steps, the concrete, the symbolic, and the abstract, that's a great way to help our little ones understand some basic apologetic concepts.

Well, that's a wrap for this episode, but as always, my prayer for you as we leave this time together is that no matter the situation in which you and the children God has placed in your care, find yourselves that you would trust that God is working all things together for your good by using all things to the image of His, Son. I'll see you next time.