{Thanks to Julie S. for our guest post today!}
About ten years ago, we spent a school year living a few thousand kilometres away from home. We decided to homeschool while we were there and since we signed up with a Christian charter school, we needed a Bible component for our daily lessons. We decided that the younger two would learn the Books of the Bible. They were in grade 1 and 2 at the time. We didn’t just want to learn the names, however, but a little about each book as well to make it something with a little more depth.
I am not terribly fond of colouring pages and fill-in-the blanks (although my kids certainly don’t mind them from time to time), so I decided we would make scrapbooks. I know that not all kids LOVE to draw, but mine did, and they were still at the age of being of happily uncritical of their artwork. We chose a book of the Bible (or two if they were short) each week, talked about when it was written, who wrote it, the time period it covered, read a somewhat random chapter on four days, asked questions to make sure they were listening, and chose a verse to illustrate (I usually wrote the verse out once they had finished drawing), then reviewed the books and verses on the fifth day. I have to say that it was not always easy. Some chapters they found difficult to understand, and some days they did not really want to draw. But we had to show our work to our supervising teacher every few weeks, and so there was enough incentive to do it anyways.
The lovely thing about this is that they still pull these scrapbooks out every once in a while and have fun looking through them, and they did learn the books of the Old Testament. By the end of the school year we had only just started the New Testament, and with moving back across the country, and going back to public school, we never did complete them.
This file (Books of the Bible Lesson Plan) is what we put together after coming back home. That year we experimented a bit with the Jewish Festivals, and it was enjoyable, so I thought it might be fun to put them both together in a more organized fashion in case I ever needed to do it again.
If you are determined, it can, of course, be used just as we used it. But it can also be used in less demanding ways as a resource – maybe a source of obscure and random trivia questions, or see if you know where this verse is from challenges. My youngest now (who was not around ten years ago) does not like to draw so much unless it is horses, so for Sunday School one year, each week before the actual lesson, we just took one book, talked about when it was written and what it was about, picked out a verse, wrote it out and illustrated it as much as she would, and each week she would add a new flash card to her collection that she could practice putting in order the next week.
Here is a link with flashcards for the books of the Old and New Testaments. Just print them out on cardstock, laminate them if you wish, and cut them apart. We kept ours in an envelope and used them in various ways to review.
There is also the Christadelphian book “The 66 Books of the Bible” by Norman Owen, if you want more information on each book.
And of course, there is the classic 66 Books of the Bible song written by Sis. Cynthia McGill.
And if you would rather have colouring pages, you can find some here.