1. Sunday School Curriculum The Diocese of the Southern United States H.G.BishopYoussef

2. Background:  Previous Sunday School Curricula available:  A translated curriculum from the the Youth Service Committee of the Coptic Orthodox Patriarchate in Egypt  Curriculum written in Arabic  Translated into English in Australia  Canadian Curriculum from St. Mark Church in Toronto  Written in English

3. Choice:  The translated curriculum of the Youth Service Committee of the Coptic Orthodox Patriarchate  Complete curriculum for grades 1 to 12  Used for many years in most of our Churches

4. Experience:  The following observations were noted during the use of this curriculum:  Differences in surrounding culture  Differences in surrounding beliefs  Differences in youth interests and social life  Differences in methods of education  Need to increase the knowledge of our youth with the Bible  Need for more focused lessons

5. Action:  A group of faithful servants from St. Mark Coptic Orthodox Church in Houston felt the need for major modification of this curriculum to better suite our children  A committee of 7 servants was formed and started the work 5 years ago

6. Stages of Work:  First Stage:  Decisions on what and how to modify the curriculum  Design a new curriculum  6 months  Second Stage:  Implementations  4.5 years

7. First Stage:  Repetitive lessons were removed  Unfocused lessons were removed  Lessons unsuitable to the western society were removed  A complete new curriculum was created for Kindergarten children.

8. First Stage (cont.):  The removed lessons were replaced with:  More Bible study lessons  Social lessons relevant to the society  Awareness lessons of other surrounding beliefs e.g. Mormons, Jehovah's Witness…etc.  Church awareness lessons  Stories of Saints

9. The Modified Curriculum Consists of:

10. First Stage (cont.):  The following Criteria were followed in redesigning the curriculum:  Concentrate most of the Bible stories between KG and grade 6  Concentrate most of the saints stories between grade 4-6  Concentrate most of the Bible studies, social topics, dogma, church history and ritual topics between grade 7-12  No topic is to be repeated within two years period  Alternated the topics in each grade between Bible, social, dogma, rituals and church history topics instead of grouping them to avoid boredom.

11. First Stage (cont.): These criteria took into consideration:  The natural child and teenage psychological development  The nature of the society and education in the U.S.  The experience of the teachers teaching different classes

12. Examples of Topics Distribution: %

13. Second Stage (Implementation):  Servants had to be recruited from all around the diocese to write ~240 new lessons and KG book (50 lessons)  The remaining old lessons had to be scanned to convert them into electronic copies  The new lessons were inserted in suitable church events order with the old lessons  The new books had to be reformatted for consistency of appearance  The new books were edited for content, language and consistency.

14. Lesson Format:  All lessons followed the following format:  Objective  Memory verse  References  Introduction  Lesson Outlines  Conclusion  Applications

15. Trend:  We started with the high school books where the greatest need for a change was felt  Subsequently we moved to the younger grades  However, our experience with book production increased and improved as the number of books we produced increased.

16. Servants:  More than 40 servants contributed to this service  Mostly from the diocese but some from outside the diocese and even from Canada  Amazingly there was great consistency in the spirit despite differences in formatting the lessons:  Some long and some short  Some in paragraphs and some in point form

17. Half Way Through:  God has led us to a servant that had already scanned the old lessons which helped expedite the production of the books  Initially 4 months/book for the first 4-5 books  Decreased to 3 months/book for the remaining 8-9 books

19. Half Way Through:  God had led us to the idea of posting the completed books on the diocese web page.  This helped:  Widespread access to the books to all the servants from different churches all around the world  Faster feedback on the performance and adequacy of the produced books  Encouragement and demand for expedited production of the remaining books  Ability to improve the books according to the need in the future

20. The Order of Lessons in Each Book  Each book is 50 lesson  The lesson are arranged similar to the church calendar  Each book starts after the Coptic New Year i.e second week of September  Filler lessons are available for the 5 th week of some months

21. The Order of Lessons in Each Book:  3 lessons for the month of September  4 lessons for each month from October through January  Variable number of filler lessons for the period between the beginning of February and Jonah’s fast.  2 lessons, one before and one after Jonah’s fast  7 lessons during the Great Fast  7 lessons for the period between Resurrection and the Feast of the Pentecost  Variable number of filler lessons between the Feast of the Pentecost and the Apostles’ Feast  3 lessons for the remainder of July after the Apostles’ Feast  4 lessons for August  1 lesson for the first week of September

22. God’s Blessing:  All through the years of this service we felt the hand of the Lord in the following:  Whenever we became weak and discouraged God would send us complements of the curriculum and requests to complete the rest of the books  Whenever, we lost vital servants for different reasons, God would send better ones  Whenever we were overwhelmed with the magnitude of the work, God would send references and resources that would expedite the production of the lessons  God has used the old and the young, each one with his/her talent to the production of this curriculum

23. Future Work:  To continue improving the curriculum according to feedback  E-mail address: SSC@SUSCOPTS.ORG SSC@SUSCOPTS.ORG  To do a second revision where we can further improve on the remaining old lessons  To continuously update the social topic to match with new hot issues in the society

24. Future Work (cont.):  To develop a curriculum for College  To develop power point presentations for each lesson  To complement this curriculum with a student activity book.

25. Adjunctive Services:  The Pre-servants Curriculum  The Holy Bible Contest

26. Pre-Servants Curriculum:  There was a need to develop a pre-servants curriculum to better prepare the servants for teaching Sunday School  Therefore, 6 year program was developed  The first 2 years prior to serving  The following 4 years to be completed during serving  Presently, the material for the first 3 years is completed and available on the diocese web site

27. Holy Bible Contest:  4 levels of 3 years intervals of Bible contest were developed:  Beginner (grade 1-3)  Intermediate (grade 4-6)  Advanced (grade 7-9)  Expert (grade 10-12)  Each level would encourage the students to read one chapter per day in the Bible and answer one question  Thus the Bible would be completed in 3 year intervals

28. Holy Bible Contest (cont.):  The question of the Bible contest are available on the diocese web site  The answers are also available with a password provided only to the servants

29. Acknowledgment:  The success of this service was due to the fact that we had a previous curriculum from the mother church as a base to build on  This was greatly appreciated when we wrote Kindergarten book from scratch.  We thought that KG book will be the easiest to write, till we discovered that it was the most difficult because we had to write all the 50 lessons  Then we realized that: “Others have labored, and we have entered into their labors” (John 4:38)

30. Thank You Have a Blessed St. Mary’s Feast