I’m sharing the lesson plans I created for our parish’s virtual summer church school program for anyone who would like to use them for their own church school or as an idea catalyst for your own parish’s needs. Our parish’s children will be spending the next eight weeks learning that we are all called to be saints, about the lives of several saints, the example these saints can have in our own lives, and sharing about our own patron saints.

We have decided to break our church school into four groups for our virtual classes:

1. Kindergarten to 2nd grade
2. 3rd to 5th grade
3. Middle School
4. High School

We will be hosting our church school classes on Zoom (free for under 40 minutes) every Sunday for eight weeks. We chose to have two classes at 12pm and the other two classes at 12:30pm – in an effort to help alleviate the strain of possibly not having enough devices or bandwidth for all of a family’s children to be on Zoom at the same time. These times also allow for families to get home after liturgy on Sundays and get a quick bite to eat before church school begins.

Our parish will be creating either a class or entire church school (undecided at this moment) book about our patron saints. The idea behind this book is to create a sense of belonging between classmates (I’m Orthodox too!), learn more about our own patrons saints as well as my friends’, and have a memorable keepsake from when we all had church school online during the Covid-19 pandemic. The books will probably be created in Shutterfly, but other options are definitely available if you would like to try this project as well.