Finding the Threads of God’s story in the Bible

This year my role at church has changed. Instead of being a Sunday School teacher, I’m the “Bible Skills Teacher” or coordinator or something. It’s a little bit of this and that, and it’s been an interesting job. For the past four months, I’ve been creating small children’s Bible studies for the kids to do each week that tie into our current Bible lesson. I split the children’s Bible studies into older and younger kids and did a lot of thinking on what to do with each of these.

Creating the tapestry of children’s Bible study

Often we teach Bible stories as random events. This week David beats a giant, next week Jesus is twelve years old at the temple, and the week after that Adam and Eve are eating some fruit. There is no continuity.

In case you can’t tell, I’m a big fan of giving stories context. I based an entire two-year Bible curriculum on teaching the Bible stories in order so kids can get an idea of what’s going on.

I also want them to see how it all connects together.

That’s what the Children’s Bible STUDY I send with the kids does

My hope for these children’s Bible studies (you can find them in my store OR on my Subscriber page, go join my newsletter) is to fill in the gaps. Put in some of the stories we don’t tell and give more context for the kids.

So when we teach about Elijah and how he fought King Ahab in a big climactic confrontation, we’re going to go back and give the background context of Elijah hiding for two years.

Or if we talk about how King Solomon is wise, and how people came from all around to learn about Solomon’s wisdom, but never share with the kids what Solomon wrote down, are we really teaching the full story of the Bible?

No Sunday School curriculum is ever going to teach all of the Bible.

It’s our responsibility as parents to fill in the holes in the tapestry. One of my goals for this blog is to equip parents to teach their kids the Bible and to study the Bible.

So each week you can take these lessons and have four studies for your kids to complete.  They all tie together. Sometimes it’s looking at the different ways God has called people to serve Him after we saw God call someone nobody expected to serve. We fill in another area of the story.

I know, I cannot fill out the complete tapestry of God’s story with these Bible studies.

It’s just not possible, that will take a lifetime of Bible study.

Sometimes it’s digging deeper into that person’s story and following their thread further as we did in some of the May homework as we read about Jeremiah and what God called him to do.

Sometimes it’s learning how God continued that thread elsewhere as we did in Joel in the April homework.

How can we have a Bible study for all of our kids?

I sat down and took the same passage, in both cases about 10 verses, and for the older kids, I gave them three questions to answer. These can make great material to talk about.

The younger kids I went through and took the same passage and turned it into a short picture book. Four pages. If you print it out front and back, it’ll make a cute little booklet. I’ve deliberately made the sentences short and as close to a first-grade reading level as I could, and they read it (or you read it to them) and they draw a picture to go with the words.

The goal is for you to talk with them about what they drew and why.

Where to find these children’s Bible studies

Just pop over to my store and you can get homework as part of the units.

Of course, you could sign up for my Newsletter, and get them for free that way. Now your thumb might get tired scrolling down because it’s all the way at the bottom of the Subscriber Freebies page, and I’ve been slowly adding in all of the cool printables I’ve made, and I’ve found quite a few.