Hello and Welcome!
These last 7 weeks teaching Sunday and Wednesday Bible classes of non and beginning readers has been quite a challenge for me! I have a whole new respect for those of you who teach these young hearts! I love how it has challenged my thinking and ways to present a Bible lesson. I realized a helper was one thing I needed and sent a message to one of our young women who was willing and ready to help the moment she got word. A good helper is a real treasure, and we look froward to working together again!
Speaking of helpers, from time to time, I have these wonderful phone visits with my daughter Cassy, who by the way, is a sister Bible teacher who lives and worships in Georgia with her husband (one of their elders), and 2 sons. One son is a sophomore in high school and the other is in his first year of college. It is great keeping up with family and such but one thing I have really come to appreciate about Cassy is that she is an outstanding children's Bible teacher and willing to share her ideas with me!
Before I began teaching my non-readers, I was trying to come up with a fun effective way to help them learn their Bible verses. Cassy shared one of her methods with me and was happy for me to share it with you!
Memory Verse Fun!
By the title of this article, you can imagine what the idea is about.
Yes, JUMPING!
But also, JUMPING BEANS!
Learning with movement!
Finding a bean pattern online was pretty easy.
I decided to make them different colors and even though my students are not reading a whole lot, I ended up adding a word or two of the Bible verse to each one. We began with the reference and went on to the words.
(Have you ever heard that learning a memory verse is like a train? The reference is the engine, so we say it first. The engine knows where we are going and takes us there. The cars that are pulled by the engine are like the words of the Bible verse, and we add them a few at a time, learning the Bible verse.)
I made two sets of the memory beans on 11 x 17 paper so they could hop down and back to the starting point while saying the verse with each hop. (You could actually draw a bean pattern whatever size you wanted onto a poster board, then trace around it onto any colored paper you prefer.)
The Bible verse was Ecclesiastes 12:13b Fear God and keep His commandments.
They did really well and remembered it weeks later!
It has been fun to pull out the verse from time to time and let them become those jumping beans once again! If you choose not to add the words to the beans your students can use this idea for more than one Bible verse, jumping to each word.
Here is our game!
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