Most children in Australian primary schools have encountered the Christmas story many times — in carols, nativity plays, shopping centre decorations. The risk is that familiarity breeds indifference. When students already 'know' the story, they stop listening. Your first task as an SRE teacher is defamiliarisation: making the strange feel strange again.
The Familiarity Problem
Why the Incarnation Is Actually Astonishing
God became a baby. Not just a person — a helpless infant, utterly dependent on a teenage girl in an occupied country, born in a feeding trough because there was no room. The creator of the universe entered his own creation as a creature. If your students aren't a little stunned, you haven't told the story big enough yet.
Use Contrast to Land the Impact
The contrast technique works brilliantly here. 'Imagine you were the most powerful person in the world. How would you arrive somewhere important? What would you wear?' (Let students answer.) 'Now here's how God arrived. A stable. A feeding trough. A young mum who'd never had a baby before.' The contrast between the expected and the actual is what makes the incarnation land as genuinely surprising.
Connect the Nativity to the Whole Story
The nativity is not a stand-alone event — it is the opening movement of the most important story in history. Jesus was born to die. Simeon's words in Luke 2 ('a sword will pierce your own soul too') are already pointing to the cross, even in the manger scene. Help older students see that the joy of Christmas carries within it the cost of Easter, and that both are expressions of the same love.
