Resources for teaching our budding rocks of faith
Through the Orthodox Pebbles project, we feel blessed to have formed connections with Orthodox Christian homeschoolers and educators around the world. This gave us an idea… We would love to organize an Orthodox worldwide Pascha exchange!
Please click HERE to learn all about it and to sign up your group.
Dear friends,
The resources we had planned for the first Sunday of Great Lent are now up on the website. They include:
Please click on the button below for a complete list of our Great Lent material.
We are including below a list of useful resources for the upcoming Triodion season. You can use them to teach:
We have a long list of resources for the whole of Great Lent on the website, for which we will send out a reminder in due time. Our next scheduled free lesson plan is on Palm Sunday, so please stay tuned!
As we approach the Triodion, the calling of Zacchaeus is a seasonal religious education theme, and teaching resources about it abound, both online and offline. We attempted to tackle this quite popular topic from a uniquely Orthodox perspective – and learned a lot in the process. For instance, did you know that, as per Church tradition, Zacchaeus followed the Apostle Peter on his travels, and later became Bishop of Caesarea in Palestine? He is now a Saint, celebrated on the new calendar on April 20. Enjoy our new teaching page, which includes a variety of free hands-on activities!
Free lesson plan: Resources for teaching the parable in an Orthodox-focused way.
Free lesson plan: Animation, printables and background to help teach the parable.
A soft fleecy fabric set to help teach young children the parables of the Publican and the Pharisee and of the Prodigal Son in a hands-on way.
Free lesson plan: All you need to teach young children about Great Lent.
Our very first physical – not digital – product: a Lady Lent hanging calendar made out of fleece fabric, to help count down the weeks from Clean Monday to Pascha.
Free lesson plan: Background and printables on Orthodox fasting.
Dear friends,
It has been a busy season for Orthodox Pebbles, and I would like to THANK YOU for your support and encouragement. As this effort grows, I keep getting feedback about the usefulness of my creations and this really makes me so happy! I am genuinely grateful for everything, Glory to God.
Please find below a short list of new Orthodox Pebbles material and developments.
Material for teaching nine Old Testament stories, focusing on their connections to the New Testament – as explained by the Church Fathers and celebrated in the Orthodox liturgical life.
Coordinating with the Old Testament stories explored in the above post, this kit contains crafting templates and a pack of cards. The templates are used to make a 3D Jesse Tree based on the Orthodox icon type of the Root of Jesse and its variations. The cards are used for educational games, to help reinforce the main themes. Additional material is offered on our website to assist with using these resources as a teaching tool at home, in class, or at a religious retreat.
For the youngest children, a hands-on sensory activity teaching the Orthodox theology, icon and hymnology of the Great Feast of the Nativity of Christ.
The newest addition to our fabric set collection, this soft, fleecy, hands-on teaching resource helps teach the theology, icon, and hymnology of the Great Feast of Holy Theophany. It comes with exclusive digital educational material available on the website.
I was so grateful to have been invited to the Greek Orthodox Church of the Holy Taxiarhai and St. Haralambos in Niles, IL, to conduct a Nativity retreat on December 11. Young and old alike learned about the relationship between the Old and New Testaments, the hidden prefigurations of the Theotokos and Christ in various Old Testament stories, and their connection to the Orthodox celebration of the Nativity of Christ. It was a wonderful experience, and I would love to do it again!
On behalf of Despina and myself, warmest wishes to all our friends for a peaceful Nativity and a blessed 2022. We are always grateful for you and your continuous support, as it is what gives meaning to our effort. THANK YOU from the bottom of our hearts!
With love in Christ,
Natalie
Dear friends,
We were very grateful for the summer break – stepping away from Orthodox Pebbles for a while always helps us put the project into perspective and get inspired with new ideas. We are now back with many plans for the following months – may God grant us the time, abilities, patience and endurance to accomplish a few of them.
While we are working on new content, we compiled a list to remind you of our existing resources that might be useful at this time of year. Please click on the button below to access it.
Warmest wishes from both of us for a blessed ecclesiastical and academic year!
Natalie and Despina
Dear friends,
On the website you will find a large collection of teaching resources for Holy Week and Pascha – both for virtual and in-person learning. We are also very excited that our friends at the Orthodox Christian Network will be using our material for their LIVE online Holy Week crafting session.
Please click on the button below for more information.
This kit is available for purchase at the Draw Near Designs Marketplace.
We are so excited to be finally able to announce this… Our new Pascha idea is now a product for purchase at Draw Near Designs Marketplace! It is a Holy Week Craft Kit, to make one craft each day of Holy Week (10 crafts in total) – accompanied by teaching material available on the Orthodox Pebbles website.
Draw Near Designs announced the craft kit in their newsletter yesterday and they run out of stock today! BUT… We found a solution!
We prepared a MODIFIED craft kit available to pre-order: It includes all the paper templates and instructions of the original kit, but does *not* include the materials for the crafts. The good news is that the modified kits are much cheaper, and most of the materials you probably have at home or in class already.
Once these sell out there won’t be time to restock again for this Pascha season. This second batch will be shipped out by Draw Near Designs mid-April, in time for Holy Week. For Sunday Schools or Holy Week retreats, Draw near Designs is offering a discount on bulk orders.
We hope you get to enjoy using our new Holy Week teaching resource as much as we enjoyed creating it!
Special thanks to Presbytera Destinie of Ascetic Life of Motherhood for exploring the kit with her sweet little children and sharing wonderful photos with us.
We are excited to be back in action after a long break! Our first item for this Sunday School year is now out: A new fabric learning set for the upcoming Feast of the Entrance of the Theotokos, available at St. Tabitha’s Workshop online fabric store. If you would like to have it by the day of the Feast (November 21 on the new calendar), it is best to place your order by November 2.
We are also working on a lesson plan to complement the fabric set, hopefully done by November 15, so please stay tuned.
We are praying you are all staying healthy and safe.
With love in Christ,
Natalie and Despina
Natalie, the creator of Orthodox Pebbles, is honored to have been invited by the Department of Religious Education of the Greek Orthodox Church of America to speak at their upcoming WEB SEMINAR: Keeping The Summer Connection Active, on Wednesday May 20, 2020 at 6:30 pm EDT. Her talk will focus on tips and strategies for holding an online Vacation Church School program and she has been hard at work creating all sorts of digital teaching material. Visit the GOArch Department of Religious Education for more details.
Social distancing has changed our lives in so many ways, and it has modified our Sunday School classes as well. Having switched to digital teaching almost immediately after the stay-at-home guidelines were put into place, we have gone through a steep learning curve trying to figure out how we could transfer the activities we used to do in our analog class to the digital realm.
We love playing games in our real classroom, so we had to find ways of playing them in our online classroom as well. We experimented with different options and came up with a few general guidelines and helpful tools for making our own games that we thought might be useful to share. We are also including some games that we created and we have been using in our own online classes. At our parish, we are planning an end-of-year Sunday School celebration session for the whole school to play them together.
Stay well, keep the Faith, and enjoy the warmer weather!
Natalie and Despina
Dear friends,
It’s been a while since we wrote a blog post – keeping up with social media, a blog, and email communication has proven to be too much for us. So, if you are interested in always receiving a notification when we create new content, please sign up to our email list by clicking on the button below. It seems our blogging will stay quite sporadic for the time being.
As the first ever stay-at-home Holy Week is going by, we have been creating a few home projects out of materials we had at hand. The pages describing them are not intended to be a comprehensive resource like our regular ones – we are not including the background information and printables we usually offer. Still, we feel that the projects would be useful to share right now, in case you would like to do them at home along with us.
You will find projects for Holy Monday-Wednesday on the website in the “Special Projects” section. Look out for new projects coming up on Holy Thursday and on Holy Saturday.
Warmest wishes to all for a blessed rest of Holy Week and a joyous Pascha in these challenging times!
Orthodox Pebbles 