Helping Your Child Find His Way Around The Bible, Part 2

Games
Referring to the list of Bible books in yesterday’s posting we can devise some very easy to make games that you and your child can use to learn the books of the Bible.

Start with either the Old or New Testament and write the names of the books down on 3x5 index cards, one book per card. Shuffle them around and have your child practice putting them in order. Use the Bible as a reference at first, letting your child use it less and less as he learns the correct order of books. This isn’t cheating when the whole purpose is to learn the books.

Once your child has begun to get a handle on the correct order of things, put a simple game board together using poster board, drawing several squares together in a winding path around the board. You can do the same thing if you want to help engage your child’s body using several sheets of construction paper taped together and put on the floor. About every five squares or so draw a star, placing a star on the very last square of the board.

Have your child throw a die and move the number of spaces indicated using a bean or a button for a marker (or himself, if using the giant floor model). If he lands on a star, he must recite the books of the Bible in correct order. You can choose if it’s the whole Bible or just the Old or New Testament. If he makes a mistake, he must go back three spaces.

The goal is to reach the end of the game board, by exact count, having correctly recited the books of the Bible each time he lands on a star. If your child happens to miss all the stars while moving around the board, he still has to land on the last one in order to finish the game.

Feel free to get creative with the other spaces on the game board. Perhaps write in some activity your child has to do, like run around the house three times (that’ll settle your kinesthetic learner right down!) or balance a spoon on his nose. While these don’t necessarily have any biblical connection, there’s nothing to say that learning the books of the Bible has to be boring!

You can use the game board for future memorizations, substituting the books of the Bible for the names of the twelve tribes of Israel, the names of the apostles, or listing the Ten Commandments. Have fun!