Explanation of our church school program for the year:

Last year, St. John the Baptist Greek Orthodox Church in Euless, TX implemented a “One Curriculum” model. The idea behind this model is to have everyone in our parish learn about the same topic in order to nurture understanding of our faith, to bring families together in conversation about each week’s lesson, and to promote greater understanding and participation in relation to each year’s overall topic of study. 

For the 2021-2022 school year, we studied the Gospel of Mark and plan to study the other three gospels in the subsequent years to follow. We started with Mark out of practicality for our parish. Our hall was under renovation and we did not start our church school year until October. We chose to start with the shortest gospel, Mark, for this reason.

All of our teachers were provided with the lessons below for their designated age group. Father Vasile would also provide a short lesson for the entire parish at the end of liturgy each week over the same topic as our teachers. Our Pre-K to 2nd grade classes used the Orthodox Children’s Bible for their lessons. Our 3rd – 12th grade classes used the Orthodox Study Bible for their lessons. We also had maps of the Holy Land during Jesus’ Time in all of our classrooms. Our Sunday School classes were in person this year and our teachers met once a week on Thursdays via Zoom (30 – 40 minutes) for weekly teacher training in preparation for each week’s lesson. Additionally, Fr. Vasile had asked me to rotate through all of our classrooms twice (two teachers in each class) in order to see the teaching styles of each of the teachers and to see how the kids were interacting (or not) with the lessons I was writing. Both of these additions were insightful and helped us immensely in further development of our church school program and also coming together as a team of teachers!

As much as the lessons below offer in the way of information and guidance, they also do not contain everything we did this year. We had quite a bit of collaboration happening behind the scenes in our weekly teacher meetings. I presented the main points of each week’s lesson to the teachers via a PowerPoint presentation. I included graphics, photos, iconography, videos, and more! We discussed teaching methodologies and I shared pictures from each of the classroom observations with everyone. We were able to see how the other teachers were presenting the lesson to their students and gain ideas for our own classrooms!

The classroom lessons were written by Jennifer Hock and submitted weekly to Fr. Vasile.
*Any mistakes or errors within these lessons belong to me, Jennifer Hock. Please forgive me.