Teacher Training Resources
This page gathers materials that support those who teach our children: seminars and webinars, guides and lesson plans, and practical classroom tools. Some belong to Hands-On Faith, the Children and Family Ministry's teacher formation program, whose Saturday training, Teach the Way, provides classroom craft, and whose monthly webinar,
Know What You Teach, deepens the content itself. Others stand on their own and are offered as the need arises. The collection grows through the year.
The Gift of Faith-Giving I Three Part Webinar
Session One: Faith You Can Touch
Faith You Can Touch explored how children come to know God through experience before explanation. With a candle, water, basil, and bread, teachers discovered how faith takes root through the senses, as our Church has always taught. Drawing on the work of David Kolb and Howard Gardner, the session showed how one lesson can open many doors, so that every child finds a way in.
Session Two: Singing Our Theology
Singing Our Theology explored the sharagan as one of the Church's oldest ways of teaching the faith. Through the hymns of our tradition, teachers discovered how the Armenian Church has carried its beliefs in melody and verse for centuries, so that what we sing, we come to believe. The session showed how even one line of a sharagan can open a lesson and plant the faith deep in a child's heart.
Session Three:
Before we can teach peace, we must first find it in ourselves. In this closing session of The Gift of Faith-Giving, teachers were invited into stillness as a form of prayer: a quiet that is not emptiness but presence, practiced in the church and carried home into the small corner where the day is gathered up and offered. The evening turned, in its second half, toward the classroom, and toward the question of how a teacher might open that same holy quiet to a child.