Love Bible verse sort #memoryverse

This year I’m working with the Tenderhearts at The Artist’s American Heritage Girl troop. We’re working through the Bible Basics badge, and one of the requirements for the badge is to read 1 Corinthians 13 and then find other Love Bible verses. I looked at that requirement, and thought, “I know! A Love Bible verse sort, it gets them thinking critically, and gives them something active to do.” So I spent way too long creating this Love Bible verses sort, which could also be used in a Bible lesson for your Sunday School.

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Supplies needed for this Bible verse sort

Love Bible verse sort printable (it’s on my subscriber page, join my newsletter), paper, glue sticks (I buy one of these once a year), scissors

Put together the Bible Verse sort

I’ve started creating instruction cards for all of my crafts, this is what you’ll see in the full lesson packs I’ve got. I learned what is natural and intuitive to me, is not always natural and intuitive to everyone else.

Cut out the verse cards and then the envelope. The envelope is really why I have the picture instructions. Since you cut out along all the lines for the cards, and for the envelope you only cut out the outline, it can get confusing.
Fold up three of the sides, and glue them together.
Now let’s get to sorting the Love Bible verses.

Love Bible verse sort

What I particularly like about this activity is how it gets kids thinking. So often they read the word love and just slide over it and don’t really think about who it is talking about and who is doing the action.

If you ask a kid about love you might get, “Jesus loves me,” or “I love God,” but they won’t be thinking about why they said it.

The goal of this Bible verse sort is to think just a little bit more.

Now there are dozens of love Bible verses. I picked 13, primarily because that’s how it best worked out to make the best use of each page.

Partially, I picked verses that are relatively easy to read. I’m working with kids reading on a second-grade level and for some a first-grade reading level. I picked the verses with relatively easy words to read.

We looked at the verses and decided if the verse talked about us loving God, us loving others, or God loving us.

Sometimes that was hard and it took some thought.

Other times it was really obvious.

Other times, the verse mentioned love more than one time and it talked about two different kinds of love. Or it wasn’t clearly obvious who was being talked about.

Ageing up this Bible verse sort

I created and did this activity with early elementary kids, but you can take the same idea and age it up.

Start off with these Bible verses, then open up your Bible to the concordance at the back.

Depending on how thorough your Bible’s concordance is you’ll find anywhere from just a few verses listed to half a page of verses to look at.

Start working with them on finding where that verse falls in the Bible, and who it’s talking about. Get them thinking about layers if they’re in junior high. Maybe look at those Bible verses in Song of Solomon talking about love and bring up how some people believe it’s also a story about God’s love for the church.