9 Ways to Include Women Saints in Sunday School

One of the fun parts of having an Accessible Church School classroom in my bookshop (Park End Books) as well as at our church is that we get to introduce so many children to the lives of saints in simple, accessible ways that include everyone. When you regularly include the stories of women saints in your lessons, girls learn that they are sacred, too, and boys and girls get to see the way the Holy Spirit has always called, worked with, energized, empowered, and transformed both men and women, boys and girls. Yet recently I have had several conversations with mature Christian women from Orthodox, Catholic, and Protestant backgrounds who knew very little about the lives of women saints. Today I want to equip you a little more to share the joy of women saints’ lives with 9 ways to teach their lives. I have included sources and noted which women saints are included in some of the books that I reference. Please add your favorite ways to teach women saints’ lives in the comments, and share this post so other people can discover these saints!

I have included Amazon affiliate links where appropriate to make sourcing easier for some items. You can also email me at summer@parkendbooks.com to order any of the books from our bookshop. Let me know the titles, and I will send you a price list and an invoice if you choose to purchase them.

Act The Stories

Act out the stories, even if you focus on just one part. For instance, make the Cross with your finger in clay the way that St. Barbara marked the marble of her bath. Weave a Cross like St. Nino’s (which was tied with the hair of the Holy Mother of God) using grape vines and raffia. Hold up a cloth to represent St. Agatha’s pall to stop the lava from ruining the city. Make explosion sounds as a girl dressed as Great Martyr Irene walks away from the explosion. If you have a cracked clay jar, bring it in and let the girl dressed as St. Perpetua point at it and say, “That jar cannot be anything but a clay jar. I am a Christian and cannot be anything but what I am.”

Dress Up

Often classrooms have child sized vestments, but it’s easy to add the elements of icons of women saints, too! Add a “Living Icons” dress up area with long silk scarves to represent clothes, round crowns (aff link), silks, tiny buildings to represent towers or monasteries, abbess staffs, palm leaves, scrolls, stuffed animals if they had animal stories like St. Melangell (hares) and St. Mildred (a deer). Use these props to help girls act out the stories and learn about how the saint is portrayed in holy icons.

Spin the Wheel: Saints’ lives of women

You can use a spinner wheel (aff link) to write on names of women saints (or stick them on the wheel with sticky notes) and have children spin it to tell one story per month (or week).

You can list gifts and fruits of the Holy Spirit as well as virtues on the sections. Whichever good characteristic you land on, help the children find that characteristic in the saints’ stories.

The act of spinning gives a lot of motor input to students to help them regulate their attention; the randomness also makes it easier for them to pay attention.

Find the Saints’ Lives

To prepare for lessons, you’ll need to find and read saints’ lives ahead of time. While there are some stories on daily reading phone apps, more extensive and detailed versions of saint stories are available in books and on church websites. Below I will list some books that have collections of saints’ lives, starting with picture books, then teen and adult books, then websites.

Books:Picture Books

Women of Faith (aff link) written by Calee M. Lee, Illustrated by Lisa Graves

Includes: St. Genevieve, St. Agnes, St. Brigid, St. Apollonia, St. Isadora, St. Dymphna, St. Sunniva, St. Margaret of Antioch, St. Paraskevi of Rome, St. Hermione, St. Ursula, St. Barbara, St. Lucy

Holy Queens and Princesses by Dionysios & Egle-Ekaterine Potamitis, Illustrated by Egle-Ekaterine

Includes: Saint Alexandria, Saint Drosis, Saint Olga, Righteous Esther, Saint Theodora, Saint Helen, Saint Ludmila, Saint Barbara, Saint Melangell, Saint Tamara, Saint Bathilda, and Saint Hypomone

Saints and Animals by Dionysios & Egle-Ekaterine Potamitis, Illustrated by Egle-Ekaterine Potamitis

Includes: Saint Helen and the cats, Saint Kerkyra and the bear, Saint Brigid and the wolf, Saint Abigail and the bees

101 Orthodox Saints and 102 Orthodox Saints from Ancient Faith Publishing: many saints in illustrated Encyclopedia format

(Catholic) Princesses of Heaven: The Flowers (aff link) Illustrations and Stories by Fabiola Garza

Includes: St. Joan of Arc, St. Josephine Bakhita, St. Kateri Tekakwitha, St. Narcisa de Jesus, St. Lucy Yi Zhenmei, St. Therese of Lisieux

Brigid’s Cloak: An Ancient Irish Story (aff link) by Bryce Milligan, Illustrated by Helen Cann

Brigid and the Butter: A Legend about Saint Brigid of Ireland (aff link) Retold by Pamela Love, Illustrated by Apryl Stott

Seven Holy Women: Conversations with Saints and Friends (aff link) Edited by Melinda Johnson, Co-authored by Georgia Briggs, Katherine Bolder Hyde, Laura S. Jansson, Summer Kinard (Me!), Melissa Elizabeth Naasko, Anna Neill, and Molly Sabourin

Includes: Saint Morwenna, Saint Kassiani, Saint Ia, Saint Nino, Saint Piama, Saint Margaret, Saint Casilda de Toledo

Islands of the Ocean: Stories from the Lives of Celtic Saints by Constantine Ganotis and Katerina Kormali, Illustrated by Eva Karantinou

Includes: Saint Melangell, Saint Gobnait (Abigail), mentions Saint Winifred but doesn’t include her story

The Golden Legend (aff link) by Jacobus de Voragine, translated by William Granger Ryan

These lives of saints were widely told throughout Latin-speaking Christian areas up until the Protestant Reformation and were a primary way that the faith spread; they were often read aloud in lieu of homilies and were often read to households. There are too many women saints to list here, but don’t miss: St. Martha of Bethany, St. Agatha

Old English Lives of Saints (aff link to one of the volumes) by Dunbarton Oaks

If your ancestors came from England, you will want to see these saints’ lives, which are presented with the Old English (think Beowulf, not Shakespeare) text on the left and modern English translations on the right. They were read aloud to households by educated women clerics and traveling clerics, as well as serving as homilies in churches. The faith spread through England with the help of these lives of saints as well as hymns and teaching by the wide range of ordained women and men in the first 1200 years of the faith.

St. Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English People (aff link)

This book includes lots of details of English Christian history, including the fact that All Saints was first kept as a feast in England, before it was celebrated in Rome and the Eastern Church. You’ll want to read about the powerful abbess, spiritual mother to bishops, and great teacher Saint Hilda of Whitby in this book. (Read a little about St. Hilda on Whitby’s tourism site.)

Celtic Spirituality (Classics of Western Spirituality) (aff link) details more of St. Hilda’s influence and shows how she influenced other saints in her work at Whitby.

Church Website sources

Life of St. Macrina by her brother St. Gregory of Nyssa. Easier translations can be found in books, but they are relatively expensive.

The Martyrdom of Sts. Perpetua and Felicity

The Acts of Sts. Paul and Thekla              

St. Hilda of Whitby another source. If you read Bede, you’ll see a fuller story.

Saint Winifred

OCA Saints’ Lives

When you are looking for Orthodox Christian saints’ lives, often the OCA website has more comprehensive versions of saints’ stories. Read ahead of time and summarize. Make sure that children ages 9 and up hear the memorable miracles such as the Great Martyr Irene bursting out of a brazen oxen surrounded by flames. Here are three to make sure not to miss!

Great Martyr Barbara

Great Martyr Irene

St. Nino Equal of the Apostles, Enlightener of Georgia

Build the Scene

Want to really set the stage for understanding the saints’ lives? Build their stories with soft blocks or modular couch cusions (like Nuggets or Toddler modular couches [aff link to an example set]). Towers, mountains, tombs, volcanoes, monastic cells, council chambers, thronerooms, can all be built to set a scene and help students imagine the story.

Adapt Games

Take big group games and patterns that work like scavenger hunts, relays, and seek and finds, and apply them to the story. One way to talk about St. Brigid’s monastery keeping an eternal flame, for instance, is to spread fire wood around the hall or room and have the students gather it together. After you talk about what would have been important to keep a flame going for 1,000 years, switch to talking about how monasteries often have lamp watchers who keep lampadas burning day and night. Then take a field trip to see the light in the altar (from outside the doors) where the priest usually keeps a flame going to show that Christ is present in the consecrated Holy Gifts.

Draw it!

Draw the story progression on a whiteboard or large paper taped to the wall as you tell it. You can add timelines and background contexts this way. If you’re stuck in a classroom that’s centered on a conference table, you can even cover the table with large craft or white paper (from a roll) and allow students to help you draw the sequence of the saints’ lives along the center of the table, with notes and ideas about details of the story along the sides as needed.

If you would like for everyone to work on a picture of the saint, have students color one large image together rather than coloring sheets. Working alongside each other on a large image builds groups, helps to regulate the students’ nervous systems by crossing the midline of their bodies when they color back and forth across large spaces, and allows teachers to direct attention easily to the parts of the icons, like crowns or crosses. Use a large printed banner of the outline (Banners on the Cheap has great sales on banner printing! [not affiliated]) or with a projector project a line drawing of the icon onto a large piece of paper ahead of time and trace it out for the group to use. Search online sites for free printable icon coloring pages, or look into images in an app like Canva.

Connect to God’s Character

Connect their stories to the virtues and gifts and fruits of the Holy Spirit. How did this saint show the spiritual gifts of prophecy, teaching, bearing the good news, healing, etc? How were they brave, chaste (showing self control), wise, and just? How were they faithful, hopeful, and loving? How were they steadfast and stable in the ways they built up their communities in the love of God? How did they show generosity?

Connect with the Gospels

Many women saints’ lives connect to the Gospels either because they are in the Gospels or because they followed Christ’s teaching or imitated Him. The myrrh-bearing women and other women disciples, St. Photini, St. Veronica (healed of the issue of blood), the saints listed in the Epistles like St. Phoebe and St. Tabitha and St. Priscilla the Apostle and St. Junia the Apostle and St. Philip’s prophesying daughters including St. Hermione the Deaconess, and saints we remember as equals to the Apostles like St. Mariamne the Deaconess (sister of St. Philip), Equal to the Apostles and St. Thekla the protomartyr of women, Equal to the Apostles, fulfilled Christ’s instruction to go and teach all people. When you are planning ahead, check your liturgical calendar to see how the saints of the month or week connect to the Sunday Gospels. You can find saints’ days on daily reading apps as well as by searching archdiocesan websites.

What would you add?

Comment below to join the conversation!

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