St. Michael's
A Resource for Orthodox Elementary Education
Santa Rosa, CA

Welcome to St. Michael's, A Resource for Orthodox Elementary Education,

previously called St. Michael's Orthodox School

 

         Although the school closed in May, 2014,(because of the age of the teachers and no one to pick up the torch), we still feel the same inspiration we had for more than thirty years.  We were greatly blessed during our years in the classroom and are keeping the website open as a means of offering to others the fruits of that blessing.  We have made presentations at Orthodox school conferences, but know that the website can, God willing, reach and benefit many more people.

          In The School Store, we have items for sale.  All the other resources on the site are free.  Please download and print any of the free materials which are helpful in your efforts toward educating your children/students.  If you have the means, please consider making a donation through Paypal.  We would appreciate your gift very much, and it would inspire us to continue to add resources to the site.  Thank you.

          Below are short descriptions of the various sections of the web site.  The title will also serve as a link to the section.

 


     The School Store

This section features the books we have written and some of the curricula materials we have developed.

History and Philosophy

     We offer here a short history of St. Michael's and some of the factors which shaped our approach to education.  This section will give a general idea; the other sections will fill expand the idea with examples.

Articles on Education

    Here you will find articles we have written as well as other articles concerning education and children neurological development.  We became very interested in neurological development when we had students who had trouble learning.  All parts of the brain are important in learning, not just the cerebral cortex.  Most of the time, cause of a child's difficulty is not the cortex, but parts of the brain below the cortex which have not been taught to do their job.  This situation can often be corrected.

Curriculum Ideas   

     This section presents some of the activites, games, and curricula that we found very helpful in teaching the children.  Some of these ideas we developed and some were developed by others.  We recommend all of them.

Learning the Psalms 

   The Psalms are an essential element of Orthodox liturgical life.  For this reason, learning Psalms were part of our morning prayers in school.  We are providing these Psalms, in PDF format, for other teachers who would like to do the same.

Learning Troparia

    Each day, as part of our morning prayers, we sang the troparion of the day.  During Festal periods, we added the troparion of the feast.  This section provides downloads of the daily tropria, with icons, as well as the troparia, with icons, for the major feasts of the Church.  The downloads are in Word format so that they can be edited to reflect the translation used in your particular parish.

Learning Poetry

     Here you will find some of our favorite poems in PDF format.  We have arranged the poems according to author, as well as according to the seasons.  This section is one of our newest, so it is not complete.  We will continue to add poems.

School Publications

   For two years, we published a quarterly booklet with short articles on education written by the teachers, and short articles written by the students, concerning what they were doing in school.  The booklet was called The St. Michael Messenger.

     When producing the booklets became too time consuming, we changed the format to a two to four page newsletter.  These downloadable, PDF, publications will hopefully give some ideas and inspiration to other teachers.

Photo Gallery   

   This section will be simply an array of photos taken over many years.  We have not started it yet.