Christ is Risen!

In 2009, I set out to gather Orthodox resources for educational use and started Illumination Learning. The website morphed a few times over the years and resources or links were added, along with some webinars and classes provided to those who wanted to learn more.

Slowly, but surely, I also started writing or creating some resources myself. Then…five years ago my parish priest, Fr. Vasile Tudora, asked me to help him develop a “One Curriculum” for our parish. The idea was for all of our church school classes to study the same topic for the year, but on their own developmental levels. We also shared these lessons with parents, our parish community, and with all of you.

I both did and did not know what I was getting into when I started writing these lessons for our parish. I can look back now and see all the paths that brought me to where I am today – teaching, having children with special needs and going to years of therapies with them, caring for 14 kids in my home at various points over the years, developing a love of writing, being a church school coordinator, and having a deep love of learning more about my faith. God has brought me to this moment. There have been many, many weeks over the past five years when I told my husband, “I don’t have the lessons written yet and I’m not sure how they’re going to get done.” But…by the grace of God, each week they got done and I would hold a church school teacher meeting on Zoom to go over the upcoming week’s lesson. During these Zoom meetings, we also shared how we taught the lessons in our classes. We gleaned ideas and teaching methodologies from each other and saw growth between all of us teachers, our students, each of our classes, and our community as a whole.

Recently, I was approached by Ancient Faith Ministries to work with them on providing an Orthodox curriculum in print – and just after Pascha, we teamed up and are working to make this a reality!

God willing, in 2026 you’ll be able to purchase the curriculum from Ancient Faith for the Divine Liturgy – for both classroom and home use. Our goal is to provide a print copy of lessons for the entire school year on the Divine Liturgy for all grades at an affordable price with the generous support of a donor.

The curriculum itself will be revised and expanded from what is currently available on Illumination Learning. As I’m going back through these first lessons I wrote five years ago, I’m realizing the growth that has occured. I’m looking forward to diving back into the Divine Liturgy curriculum and re-writing it!! With that being said, the current lessons will be taken down in June. Please save whatever you would like to use before June – and then look forward to the new lessons coming soon and available through Ancient Faith Ministries!