A teaching resource collection for young Orthodox Christians
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ORTHODOX PEBBLES PRODUCTS
In addition to the extensive digital resource collection offered on this website at no charge, Orthodox Pebbles also produces hands-on teaching tools for the Orthodox classroom and home.
YOUR SUPPORT IS APPRECIATED!
Working on this project has been an amazing blessing for us. Our mission is to keep creating high-quality, free, online Orthodox Christian educational resources for young children, adding new topics to our website every school season – an endeavor that requires a significant time investment, and expenses for software, art supplies and web hosting. If you are finding our content useful, you feel it is worthy enough not to be used for free, and you are able to, please consider supporting our work.
As Orthodox Pebbles is a religious education project, our mission from the start has been to offer our digital resources free of charge to the whole Orthodox Christian community so that everyone, including people who cannot afford to pay for them, can use them. We have also decided to keep our website forever advertisement-free, as we feel that, given its religious focus, it would be inappropriate to commercialize it in that way. We have been hoping that, as our resources become known and used, people who enjoy them and are able to, will choose, on their own accord, to support us for the quality of the material and for the work we are putting into it. We are sincerely grateful for your contribution.
To SUPPORT our project, you have two choices:
Individual contribution
Every time you make a single contribution, we will email you a surprise digital gift as a token of our appreciation.
Continuous support
When you become our patron, and depending on your pledge tier, we will send you a little gift as a token of our appreciation.
WELCOME!
We are Natalie and Despina, and we are so happy you have landed on our online corner! We’d be delighted if you found something you would like to use. Here, we are compiling a FREE collection of digital teaching resources for the Orthodox Sunday School classroom and home, targeting the younger age groups (Preschool and early Elementary). Natalie is the creator and owner of this project, while Despina contributes as a researcher and writer. Our content is not meant to replace the official Orthodox Church curricula, but rather to complement them, by offering extra enriching activities for the children, as well as helpful background resources for the adults.
Our material is grouped in two ways (by theme and by season), to make it easier to navigate depending on your needs. You can also use the Search feature on the bottom of this page to look for a specific topic.
We do not claim to be experts in Orthodoxy or in education, rather the exact opposite – we are continuously learning and growing in Christ as we realize the vastness of the journey. This website is a reflection of our own personal experience teaching and coordinating our local parish Sunday School as volunteers, combined with Natalie’s background in design, illustration and Orthodox iconography.
Your opinion, thoughts, and suggestions are always welcome, so please don’t hesitate to contact us, either using the contact form or sending an email to orthodoxpebbles @ gmail.com.
We wish for your journey to be a happy and fruitful one, and we hope to see you again soon!
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
- None of this would be remotely possible without the prayers and support of Natalie’s spiritual father, Fr. Pavlos Pavlides at the Monastery of St. John the Baptist in Megara, Attica, Greece.
- We gratefully acknowledge the guidance over the years from our parish priests, Archimandrite Fr. Anastasios Garaboa, Archimandrite Fr. George Nikas, Fr. George Kouzelis, Fr. Athanasios Kyritsis, and Fr. Peter Souritzidis.
- Special thanks to Fr. Dr. Tony Vrame, former Director of the Department of Religious Education, Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of America, for his invaluable help and encouragement.
- Sincere thanks to the iconographers for use of their works:
– Athanasios Clark, whose icons we are using either with permission from the artist or courtesy of the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of America Department of Religious Education.
– Michael Alevizakis, Julia Hayes, Dmitry Shkolnik, and Dorothea Giannoukou-Antoniou, who have graciously offered us photos of their icons or icon frescoes. - Deepest thanks to Presbytera Destinie of Ascetic Life of Motherhood for exploring our creations with her sweet children and sharing fantastic photos with us.
- Finally, we are especially thankful for the patience and continuing support of our husbands and children, who have been dealing with messy homes, unprepared meals, and tired, sleepless wives/moms, while we are working on this project.
Terms of use
Please note: The copyright of our work belongs solely to Orthodox Pebbles. We are offering our material to the public to be used as a whole, and only for classroom and personal use. This means we do not allow for users to break our material up into individual parts (images or text), or to download images or text from our website, and use those parts in their own creations – analog, digital, or online – even if these creations are only meant to be used for teaching. For example, a user is not permitted to include our material in any way in their own slideshows, worksheets or videos (local or in the “cloud”), even if they mention us as the source. If you are interested in creating a specific teaching activity with our material, please contact us – we may be able to create it instead, for the benefit of the whole Orthodox community.
Additionally, we love seeing photos on social media of our material being used; however, if you want to showcase our resources in any other way in a website, newsletter, blog or social media post, please contact us first.
Finally, we kindly ask that you do not directly share the material you download from our website with others. Please point them to our website instead, so they can download it from here.
Thank you for being fair and respectful of our work!
Scrapbooking paper used in the illustrations
In the first years of Orthodox Pebbles, Natalie used commercial scrapbooking paper to cut and glue the illlustration collages by hand. As time went on, she gradually moved to making her own collage papers and manipulating them digitally. The paper we used in our early illustrations comes from the following collections:
- The Paper Studio
Eclectic Remix 12″x12″ - The Paper Studio
The Basics 12″x12″ - Recollections multi-patterned paper pad
12″x12 - DCWV Double Sided Cardstock Stack
12″x12″ - Colorbök – Spray Paint Cardstock
12″x12″ - Jane Davies
Collage Papers - Pebbles
Front Porch 12″x12″
Orthodox Pebbles 