One week ago we finished all of the school work I hoped to accomplish for the year.
One of my goals for the year was to get a better feel for the Liturgical year and incorporate more of the saints and feasts into our family and school life. Despite mixed reviews from friends and other Orthodox homeschoolers I decided to give Children’s Garden of the Theotokos a try for the year anyway.
Like most things I’ve tried with homeschooling so far, I found myself not necessarily in love with or using everything laid out in the curriculum. However, I loved the overall concept of the curriculum and found myself using it as a springboard for incorporating other saints and feasts that we were interested in. After sharing some of my experience with a few friends, I decided to write and show pictures of what we did here in case any other Orthodox homeschoolers out there are looking for ideas.
I really liked the artwork and the stories of saints written for children in particular. We did not incorporate the music, circle time, or role playing into our school. I also thought the work during Holy Week was a little on the heavy side, but it was the only thing we did that week and as such was doable for us. I thought the Nativity vowel poems and the Christmas Feast projects were a little redundant. I liked the idea of keeping the artwork together in the Waldorf notebooks. There were only a couple problems with these: not enough pages in the Lent to Pentecost book and there were several projects (like the Nativity vowel poems) and feast days that did not have have a notebook or a place to be. We wound up starting a liturgical year journal in a composition notebook for these. This is also where we started putting some of the additional feasts that I decided we should cover.
So, with the included Waldorf books (three), the Book of Days, and the liturgical year journal we wound up having five books for the whole year that covered our Garden of the Theotokos stuff. This year, I have already decided I just want it all in one place. I found some spiral bound sketch books (unlined medium weight paper) at Target and spent some time on the computer designing a cover for it that I just glued over the existing cover. I liked this idea of stuff contained in a book so much that we’re using it for science and history next year too.
When I was doing my lesson planning last summer, I had looked at the liturgical year calendar to line up this curriculum, but I also looked for Saints or Feasts I thought were significant such as names I was slightly familiar with, that I thought we should at least talk a little bit about or do more. For some of these I was able to find children’s books from various Orthodox publishers or if they were well known enough (like St. Patrick) there were lots crafts or activities to be found on Pinterest. Some were also from our classic Old and New Testament Bible stories so I could always go to our copy of The Child’s Story Bible for those. If there was not necessarily a craft or artwork I could think of, I would look on the Orthodox Church in America’s Department of Christian Education Line Drawing Resources for a coloring page or find an icon of the person or the event and print it out and along with the words to one of the hymns about it so we could copy a line of it for handwriting practice.
For some feasts we did something for it, but it didn’t necessarily work to put it in the book, like St. Sebastian which was one of our Kindness Kids activities during Nativity:
St. Basil and the Vasilopita:
Theophany when we went to Santa Maria and the beach:
Overall, I really liked this curriculum with my adjustments for what I knew would work and didn’t feel awkward to me and we’ll be using it again in much the same way this year. I’ll probably start having Jillian do copy work instead of tracing for handwriting practice and some more advanced artwork. Ethan will do what Jillian did this year.
Edited to add: I have some Pinterest boards going that have craft and art ideas for various feasts and saints:
Daylight Rising 