Thanks to the fact that the traditions of Orthodoxy are being revived in Russia, almost every city near a church has its own Sunday children’s school. If you are interested in this question, you can find out about its existence from a local priest, or talk to parishioners. Classes there usually start in September. If you decide to attend Sunday school for children with your child, it is better to think about it in advance. What is the preparation? If the child has not yet been blessed by the church, he will need to be baptized, familiarized with the basic rules of visiting the temple, and Orthodox holidays.
Modern teaching of Orthodoxy
Nowadays, many children know much more about Christianity than their own parents. Patriarch Alexy II proposed adding the subject of Orthodoxy to the school educational program. At such lessons, children are introduced to the basic traditions, history, and culture of faith. Initially, teaching was an experiment and only in some schools. All teachers noted how such lessons have a positive impact on students’ academic success and behavior. It was decided to introduce the subject of Orthodoxy in all schools for grades 4-5.
For those who want to introduce their child to Christianity much earlier, there are Orthodox Sunday schools for children at churches. There is no need to think that in such institutions the classes are uninteresting and boring, difficult and not suitable for age. The teachers here most often are hieromonns, priests, wives of priests, and those who believe in God with their souls. The program is selected in such a way that it is age-appropriate, accessible to understanding, and all the nuances of working with young children are taken into account.
Don’t let the name of the institution mislead you, because Sunday school is not boring lessons, endless tests, or preparation for exams. Its difference is that teaching here is a call from the soul, openness, and the cultivation of love for Christianity. Here they teach children to open the world and communicate freely.
Traditions of spiritual education in Russia
In our country, Orthodox monasteries and churches have long been centers of spiritual education for parishioners, and often the only educational institutions accessible to ordinary people. Our great-grandfathers and great-grandmothers also found the time of parochial and Sunday schools, in which they were taught not only the law of God, that is, the basics of Orthodoxy, but also writing, reading, arithmetic and history.
After the revolution, schools stopped teaching any subjects related to religion. Only in the late nineties did such a thing as Sunday school for children return from oblivion. Many parishes revived their schools with rich traditions of spiritual education, and in general education institutions children began to study such a subject as the fundamentals of Orthodox culture.
Sunday school for children: division into classes
The division into classes in Sunday school is quite arbitrary. Children up to four years old are taught in the primary class. They come with their mothers. As a rule, these are the children of regular parishioners. There are also cases when a mother who is far from the church brings her baby to Sunday school, and after that she herself becomes a regular visitor to the temple. The second grade is attended by children from four to eight years old, the third - from eight to twelve, and so on. The number of classes in each school depends on the abbot, program and teaching methods.
If you decide to attend Sunday school, you need to familiarize yourself with some rules in advance:
- girls must wear headscarves and long skirts to classes;
- Each school has its own schedule and procedures, you need to get acquainted with them in advance;
- classes for boys and girls are held in separate classes;
- Sunday school teaching should be completely free.
Sunday school lessons for children
The teaching methodology for children under four years of age is based on educational games. Children are engaged in drawing, singing, modeling, and finger games. There is only one nuance: if they do crafts, then the theme is Christmas or Easter. If they listen to stories, then from the Children's Bible, Holy Scripture. Even fun riddles for Sunday school children have a religious theme.
Each lesson begins and ends with prayer. After classes, older children go to work with their parents. Attending Sunday school every week gives a child the feeling that church is becoming part of his life. Surrounded by believers, his own faith in God strengthens.
The second grade in Sunday school is already more serious; here the children are prepared for entering a comprehensive school. Classes instead of one and a half hours increase to three, and are held without parents. Children already feel their own independence and importance. In addition to general classes, the child learns the basics of various crafts, theatrical art and much more. Any activity is useful for the benefit of others. At the age of ten, children already understand that a craft made by his hands and sold at a charity fair will benefit orphans.
In third grade, classes are extended to four hours. Children study special disciplines: Church Slavonic language, God's Law. They practice icon painting and sing in the church choir.
Special children in the temple
The most common problem is, of course, misunderstanding on the part of people around you. From time to time they will have to encounter in the temple those for whom such a child will disturb. Worship requires silence, but it is difficult to explain the rules of church piety to children with special needs. Moreover, sometimes it is simply impossible to silence them.
I believe that the Church is for everyone. God wants to see everyone. And a special child is also worthy of communion with God. Yes, he screams, he sometimes walks where he shouldn’t, breaking all the rules. Because of it, it is impossible to hear the songs and the Gospel. But where are our Christian virtues? Where is the humility? Where is the love for one's neighbor? Selfishness is what mothers face when they bring such children to church. Many begin to be indignant, forgetting about the mental pain of this mother. God is her only hope and peace in this world. Today she came to the temple to talk with Him, to share her experiences, but did not listen to the reprimands of the parishioners. This needs to be understood and accepted.
Another common problem for others is giving unnecessary advice without knowing the problem. There is such a concept in psychiatry - emotional. The patient needs to take some action to normalize his psyche. If such a patient is not allowed to do what he has in mind, he begins to develop mental disorders in the form of hysteria, tics, or even convulsions. Let me give you an example. A mother and a weak-minded boy come to our church. On one of the holidays, I see a picture: a boy takes a broom and sweeps the ramp, right at the entrance. By cleaning, he, of course, prevents people from entering the temple. And so I see how the broom is taken away from him three times, but two minutes later Mishenka, indignant, brings it again and continues to sweep.
I had to explain why it was so important to give him the opportunity to take revenge with a broom. And then I hear the phrase: “Maybe it’s better to give him toys?” This broom then became the only opportunity for his mother to pray calmly. Toys wouldn't help the boy. His brain itself chose an activity to calm down. Using such a trivial case as an example, I would advise parishioners: without knowing the medical history and without knowledge in psychiatry and oligophrenopedagogy, there is no need to give advice to mothers. They know better what their children need, how to treat them and how to raise them. No matter how rich life experience you have, your advice is unlikely to be correct, since you have no idea about the specifics of a particular disease.
I would wish all communities patience, love and tolerance towards special people. Usually incidents arise from a lack of humility and love. If people have true Christian love in their hearts, they will think of others first. They will try to do everything to make the mother and her unusual child feel comfortable in the temple. They will be afraid to once again wound the already grief-stricken soul of the parent. We all need to remember the golden rule: “Do no harm!”
There are many children with special needs in our parish. This, thank God, does not bother anyone. Some parishioners help mothers with housework, others sit as nannies for paralyzed children. Some donate good things or money for medicine. Someone will simply pray for the health of these children and support them with a kind word. It’s not always possible to donate money or time, but everyone has a kind word.
I will say this to mothers of special children. Alas, at the end of your life you will encounter ignoramuses. Learn to be more accepting of their misunderstandings. Show humility - such a wonderful Christian virtue. If you listened to the remark, apologize and don’t get angry. They give intrusive advice - listen carefully and thank them. You can’t explain to everyone what and how. But still remember that in church people pray and study, and it’s hard for them when someone nearby breaks the silence during the liturgy, even if not of their own free will. Understand them and don't get angry.
How are the lessons going?
Sunday school for children has as its main goal the spiritual enlightenment of the younger generation. From an early age in our modern world, a child is immersed in a sea of information, some of which can negatively affect the formation of personality. Sunday school helps you sort through this flow and choose what is useful and necessary.
Teachers conduct lessons here according to the type of dialogue. Every student has the opportunity to speak out; the teacher listens carefully to everyone’s opinion. In conversations, children find answers to their endless questions, gain communication experience, and learn to find the right solutions. In addition, speech develops in dialogue and the ability to listen to the interlocutor is cultivated.
All material is presented by the teacher in a simple form, and the children can draw their own conclusions during the conversation. Modern training is accompanied by various video and audio materials and manuals. Intellectual tournaments are very popular, where topics for Sunday school for children provide an opportunity to strengthen their knowledge of Orthodoxy.
How to learn to live again
Previously, I was an ordinary “passer-by”, twice a year I ran into the temple to bless Easter cakes and water. But one day a misfortune happened - it turned out that my son had a rare incurable disease. And away we go: clinics, professors, examinations and sheer despair. “Learn, mommy, to live again with Tourette syndrome. Medicine is powerless in this matter,” the attending physician told me. Thousands of unanswered questions plunged me into depression, but soon I realized that tears could not help my grief. I decided to treat my son myself. I studied hundreds of books and magazines and developed my own treatment system. The disease began to recede.
I created my own blog, where I provided psychological support to mothers of children with a similar diagnosis and shared my experiences. After a while I realized: we cannot do anything without God. “Since medicine is powerless, maybe we can ask Him for help?” - I thought. We took the child to the Svyatogorsk Lavra, and there I lost my temper again. She cried bitterly and was forced to leave the cathedral. In the courtyard, one of the monks approached me and offered his help. Apparently, I shouted so loudly that he couldn’t pass by. He listened to me and said: “Go to the Orthodox church closest to your home and ask to serve. Take on any job. The Lord will have mercy on your child." I knew nothing about the Church then. Where to go? How to explain everything?
I came up with the idea of writing a blog article about the Church’s attitude towards mentally ill children. Since there was a temple of the Great Martyr Panteleimon near the school where my children studied, I went there for consultation with a priest. This is how I met Archpriest Kliment Anisimov. He became one of those people who helped me overcome the psychological crisis due to my son’s illness. His advice saved me from despondency more than once.
At first I helped clean the temple. Then, with the blessing of the priest, she taught early development classes to the children. I did creative work with the little parishioners, prepared them for school, and retold biblical stories. Over time, the older children were left without a teacher, and I took responsibility for their education. Now I am a catechist, a teacher, and a teacher-organizer all rolled into one. Working with children educates and inspires me. I am grateful to God for this work.
Strengthening the family
Much attention is paid here to strengthening the family. Support from the older generation during Sunday school classes is simply necessary. Parents and grandmothers are actively involved in the educational process. Lectures are organized for them, where they can get questions and answers that concern them, and understand the problems. Parents participate in meetings, help care for the temple grounds, and organize holidays. This work requires inspiration and strength, faith in the Lord. Together with children, various excursion trips, pilgrimages to holy places, and hikes are carried out. All these joint activities strengthen family relationships, develop a healthy personality, and this is the goal of spiritual education.
Dear friends and colleagues, have you ever thought about what the future holds for Orthodox Sunday school? Interesting question, isn't it? Today we want to share with you our vision, forecasts, and plans for the future...
What is Orthodox Sunday school like now? Are its forms of work modern or already outdated and do not keep up with the changing pace of life of human society? Who is a Sunday school teacher today and what can he become? These are all serious questions, and in fact there are many more. These questions must be answered, since the existence and effectiveness of the Orthodox Sunday school as a whole depends on it. Today we, the developers of the Voskresk project, decided to share with our users (and with you, dear reader, first of all) our vision of the situation and forecasts for the future, as well as what we plan to do.
Sunday school today
This point deserves a separate large article, but it is worth dwelling on in this one. Based on the analysis of many years of statistics that we collect using the website voskreska.org, as well as surveys we regularly conduct, we believe that Sunday school today looks undervalued and yet deprived of attention. Of course, the leadership of the synodal departments of religious education and catechesis is working on the development of Sunday schools, proposing important strategic directions for action, and creating ever more advanced standards of spiritual education. But in our opinion, in the modern world it is impossible to get by with active work “from above” alone. It is important to know what the situation is with specific teachers, in specific schools, with specific students. It is important to receive so-called feedback from the audience for whom standards and programs are being developed. The Voskresk project has been conducting research for several years in the field of obtaining adequate feedback from the direct audience of Sunday schools: teachers, head teachers and directors. We do this based on an analysis of search queries that bring users to the site voskreska.org, which occupies leading positions in the results of the largest search engines. This analysis allows us to take exactly those steps that will make the lives of specific schools, their teachers and students better. Orthodox Sunday school is a serious direction and even an entire industry that needs to be seriously addressed. If we can understand this and adjust our actions, then the Sunday school of the future will be very powerful and effective. We share the statistics we collect with the whole world, publishing annually the “Journal of Annual Statistics”.
In the absence of adequate changes in the approach to the work of Sunday school, we predict a gradual decline in society's interest in it and in the Orthodox faith in general. According to modern research, in some highly developed European countries, up to 90% of representatives of generation Z (people born after 1995) consider themselves irreligious, and therefore indifferent to Sunday school.
What is needed for development?
Sunday school can become a very serious area of activity in the Church, but in our opinion, the enthusiasm of teachers and those responsible for spiritual education is not enough here. The stable development of a Sunday school is possible if there is a sufficient material component, that is, the Sunday school should have its own financial flows, which could not only provide the necessary technical and methodological equipment, but also allow teachers to feel more confident in their ministry. Working in a Sunday school as a volunteer and working in it with financial support are still different things. Where these financial flows will come from: will it be investments from the parish or diocese, or will it be achieved through reasonable monetization of the educational process itself (while observing the general principle of free religious education) is a separate question. However, in our opinion, the need for financial investment in any education is an obvious fact.
What will the educational process be like in the Sunday school of the future?
We predict changes in both the educational process itself and the tools that teachers of the future will use. Today, a Sunday school lesson, as a rule, consists of a retelling by the teacher of a biblical story or the text of the catechism, more or less diluted with video materials, creative tasks and quizzes. In the future, the process of students obtaining information will largely move to the Internet. We are talking about an electronic supplement for Sunday school, where interactive lessons will be hosted on special servers (cloud storage), by studying which the student will be able to effectively extract information about some biblical event or aspect of the doctrine. Here, not only the capabilities of video and audio can be fully used, but also the currently actively developing technology of virtual reality (VR), where, with the help of a special headset (VR glasses), a student could immerse himself in the atmosphere of the Jerusalem Temple from the time of King Solomon and not only read about this, but also to see everything with your own eyes with a 360-degree view. All this is quite possible today.
So, will the traditional Sunday school meeting with the priest and the teacher disappear? Absolutely not. After all, we specifically emphasized the use of the Internet in the context of obtaining information. But the purpose of Sunday school is to teach the Christian life, not to simply receive information. Therefore, the time that teachers now spend retelling the Bible or catechism will be spent on live communication within the community (for example, discussing what a student watched the day before in the virtual office of his Sunday school), specially designed games and quests, volunteer events in those places where they need help. Thus, Orthodox Sunday school will become not only a word, but also a deed, which is especially important in terms of the personal spiritual life of a Christian.
Voskresk is already working to create a virtual Sunday school, which can be used not only by students, but also by the teachers themselves. With the ever-increasing availability of the Internet from anywhere in the populated area, a teacher will not necessarily need to carry a paper note, a flash drive with a video clip or a presentation to class, since he will be able to upload all this to his Voskresk virtual office, and then simply open it in the classroom.
What might tutorials look like in the future?
In the future, we also predict the development of electronic forms of teaching aids. In what sense? It is not at all necessary that students in the Sunday school of the future will sit in class or in church with tablets... The point is that even now printed versions of textbooks are not available to all teachers who search for scanned versions of these manuals on the Internet and then print them out . Our latest survey on what kind of teaching aids teachers want to have showed that a significant portion of respondents prefer to receive an electronic version of the manual without having to purchase a printed version. That is why Voskresk Laboratory has completely abandoned the development and distribution of printed teaching aids and materials. Instead, we are working on manuals in the “print it yourself” format, which involves the teacher receiving a ready-made manual that just needs to be printed in the required number of copies. This format will become especially relevant as color printing capabilities increase. This format is advantageous because:
— printing a paper manual and its further delivery to the end user is a very expensive part of production. According to our calculations, the cost of delivering single copies of manuals to remote regions will be several times higher than their own cost and will make it impossible for ordinary teachers to purchase them. A manual in the “print it yourself” format does not require printing or delivery, which means the school pays an incomparably lower price for it.
- if we are talking about workbooks for students, then the school needs to purchase them according to the number of students, which also amounts to a very large cost. Manuals in the “print it yourself” format allow the school to replicate high-quality material for any number of students without changing the price of the manual itself.
— for electronic manuals there is no need to find opportunities for warehousing and storage, unlike their printed counterparts. This is especially true if the school has a large number of students.
What can an Orthodox Sunday school teacher of the future be like?
Today, an equal sign is placed between the Sunday school teacher and the grandmother from the candle box in the church in terms of the immutability of their status: “as you taught today, so will you teach tomorrow and in a year.” As a rule, no one talks about the professional and personal growth of a teacher. In our opinion, the prospect of a person’s professional and personal growth as a Sunday school teacher is an excellent driver for his spiritual life as a Christian. How can this be achieved? First, by including each individual teacher in a larger community of educators. The Voskresk social network is directly involved in the formation of such a community, which, in our opinion, should become a prestigious expert ecosystem in which every teacher can feel needed, receive support and professional advice, and compare their teaching experience with the experience of other teachers. All this will allow him to develop personally and professionally.
Secondly, the Sunday school teacher must be allowed to sell his knowledge to a certain extent. Yes exactly. And in the platform we are developing we provide this opportunity. Some teachers, more inclined to development and creativity, will be able to create original teaching aids, courses and materials that other teachers, who do not have the opportunity to develop their own methods, could purchase from the former for their own use. This opportunity can significantly increase the motivation of creative teachers and improve the quality of work of colleagues who, for various reasons, are less inclined to creativity. In our opinion, if a favorite activity brings in additional income, this makes the result even better, since most teachers are family people and the financial issue has not been canceled for them.
These are some of our speculations about the possible state of the Orthodox Sunday school of the future. Probably, some of them will seem extremely surprising to you, but the future often surprises. If everything that is written about above allows people to come to Christ and embark on the path leading to eternal life, then it will become not only possible, but also necessary. The Voskresk team sincerely wishes you God's help and creative passion in our high task of pedagogical service!
