Hello again friends,
How’s the Fall weather been treatin’ ya? I love the colors of Fall; my favorite is the brilliant oranges of the maples!! God is the most brilliant artist of all time!
Most days @homewithmykings we do Basic Bible Business. What’s that you ask? Simply trying to teach my kids the structure of the Bible. The basics. Here’s the back story…
I accepted Christ as an adult and so I have, in a sense, much to “catch up on”. I was exposed to the Word as a child going to school in Jamaica, because memorizing prayers and Bible verses were a natural (and the very first) part of our school day from the primary grades through high school. An academic cultural norm, so to speak. I had the (eternal) benefit of memorizing verses and prayers. As it stands now, in my adulthood, I have been learning how to truly grasp the Word in all its facets. One of those being, just understanding the structure of the Bible. Which books are prophetical, which are poetical, the chronology, etc?
Last year, as I was praying about what part of our homeschool Bible study needed growth, my Spirit nudged me and said, “Hey Wendy, you need to teach your kids the Bible in all its ways so they can leave home with a full understanding of the Word”. Then I felt God showed me several things, the most important being I will not be able to teach my children EVERYTHING about the Bible!! That truth freed me up!!! Lol. Pheew! He also said, I’m going to show you what you DO NEED to teach them and I’ve already given you the tools to do so. You see, about six years prior, God allowed me to connect with a small group Bible study to, among other things, learn how to understand the structure of the Bible. The same books that I used in that Bible study group was the same ones God reminded me about!! Of course!! I snatched the first one from my Bible tools bookshelf, 30 Days to Understanding the Bible. God always goes before us in everything and he knows what we need before we even ask. You gotta love Him!
I will be doing a series of posts sharing the different areas I believe God wants us to focus on for our home and homeschool, but today @homewithmykings we’re doing some Basic Bible Business.
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First, a Pop Quiz, think fast!! (scroll down for the answers…don’t cheat though!) 🙂
- How many books make up the Old Testament?_______
- How many Epistles are there? ________
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Here’s What We Used
- The Bible
- 30 Days to Understanding the Bible (buy it here)
Here’s How We Do It
We use kind of a mind mapping method. The Bible being the main theme, hence, we place it in the center and the basic Old and New Testament facts are the branches. We used craft sticks to show the connections. Like this.
Here’s the Synopsis
The Bible:
- 39 books in the Old Testament
- 27 books in the New Testament
- 66 books in the whole Bible
Old Testament
- The Old Testament is the story of God and the Hebrew people.
- There are 3 kinds of books in the Old Testament
- 17 Historical books
- 5 Poetical books
- 17 Prophetical books
New Testament
- The New Testament is the story of Jesus, the Church He founded, and its growth under the leadership of His apostles after His death.
- 5 History books
- 13 Pauline epistles
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- 9 General epistles
The boys really like the tactile aspect of this activity. We do the basic structure outline (as pictured above) at the beginning of our Bible study time. We do narration of the chapters we’ve studied so afterwards, each child files their Bible narration pages in their Bible Scrapbooking Binder which is divided into the 12 eras. (more on that in a follow-up post on Bible Business).
You can download a sample of 30 Days to Understanding the Bible here. It can be used by all ages, it’s just a matter of tweaking it. The information throughout it is very helpful for anyone at any stage of their walk with Christ and getting to know more about (the structure of) His word. In a previous post I talked about a paradigm shift and using whatever tools you have to teach the skill sets you want your kids to learn. This follows that same concept. We are not relying on 30 days, as the book title suggests, to know everything contained within, we’ll instead just keep going at our own pace, until we reach mastery.
How do you do your “Bible business” at home? Share some of your tools and tips.
Wendy
