A Three or Four Year Curriculum Plan

There are many ways to determine what curriculum plan you want to follow. If you are using a good curriculoum series, this is really done for you. You can choose to follow a series of books such as Fr. Hopko's 4 book "Rainbow" Series. This series is divided into five categories: doctrine, spirituality, church history, scripture and liturgy.

This is a great series for reference, and you should certainly own them, but it will need a good bit of work on your part to make it "used friendly." If however, you want to use several resources, or this does not work for you, I found the following guideline worked well:

Areas to Be Covered:
Old Testament

New Testament

Church History

Sacraments

Church Music

Church Teachings (theology)

Church Practice (what we do and why we do it)


How?
Each of these general categories will probably be touched upon each year. Decide which topics you wish to center on during a certain year, and take the material you wish to use and “tweak it” for each age level.

For example, with the Sacraments, you may wish to cover them in this way:

Year 1: Baptism and Holy Communion

Year 2: Confession and Anointing

Year 3: Marriage and the Priesthood

Then in year one, you will teach Baptism and Holy Communion to all, just on different levels. Same for teaching lives of Saints, or any other topic.

*This plan is a must if you are designing your own curriculum, but can be very useful too, even if you are using actual textbooks. Your 45 minutes or hour should not consist only of using the textbook, but of supplementary material- films, games, maps, lives of the Saints, stories, etc.