Why Observe Good Friday?

I was always astounded as to how few students had any idea or understanding about why Good Friday was a holiday. Probably there are many adults as well that see Good Friday as just an extra day to be off for the Easter weekend, perhaps an additional shopping day, or another day to plan and prepare Easter baskets or Sunday’s family get together. It seemed imperative when I taught third graders that I make an effort to “educate” the third graders as to the reason for Good Friday. The piece below entitled Cultural Literacy, Good Friday, and My Faith that I wrote explaining how I accomplished this was published in the periodical, Teachers of Vision several years ago.

Cultural Literacy, Good Friday, and My Faith

            Often spring provided an opportunity for holiday education in my third grade classroom.   Seldom did students arrive in my classroom with an intelligent grasp of why Good Friday was labeled as a holiday on the school calendar. Each year I casually asked why we were scheduled to be out of school the Friday before Easter and usually received very few knowledgeable responses. This lack of understanding of the reason for Good Friday always presented itself as a teachable moment for what Hirsch, Kett, and Trefil refer to as “cultural literacy” in their work, The New Dictionary of Cultural Literacy.^* My students needed a cognizance of the significance of Good Friday being designated as a holiday in the same way a well-rounded person has a working knowledge of the Jewish holiday of Purim or the origin of Saint Patrick’s Day.

            Our rural community embraced Christianity, yet as a whole my students were predictably and woefully uninformed as to so many of its tenets, such as Good Friday. My approach to imparting needed cultural literacy about this spring holiday was a brief introductory presentation of the crucifixion of Christ as a fact of history. I then read aloud a book in our classroom collection entitled Easter Women by Carol Green.^** This book in rhyme simply acquainted the young reader with the events leading to the first Easter. 

            An added boon was the discovery of an Accelerated Reading quiz for the book.  Our school was immersed in the use of Accelerated Reading, one of the Renaissance Learning programs, designed to create lifelong readers and establish a love of leisure reading in the lives of our elementary students.^*** Our school acquired access to all the quizzes available from Accelerated Reader, so my students were always eager to check their comprehension of the selections that have been read aloud to them as well as the books they read themselves.  

            Following our completion of the book, just before we filed to the computer lab to take the Accelerated Reading quiz over it, a student commented, ‘But why is it called “Good Friday” since it was such a bad day for Jesus?’ A rather shy, but well-versed student quietly responded, “He took our sins on the cross so it was a good day for us.” This exchange left little for me to say as an educator. My students had wrapped up the lesson for me in their brief dialogue. How better could the very heart of my faith have been shared without me speaking a word!

 *E. D. Hirsch, Joseph Kett, James Trefil.  The New Dictionary of Cultural Literacy Third Edition.  (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2002)

**Carol Green.  The Easter Women (St. Louis: Concordia, 1987).

***www.renlearn.com/ar



This class of third graders inspired the above article.
Photograph by Blunck's.