Teaching Psalms 23 to kids

You’ve heard me complain frequently about my goal to read through Psalms this year.  Jeff gets to hear it even more often, but I do recognize it’s important, and there is a reason it’s in there.  Since we’re studying David’s life, I figure now is a good time to introduce Psalms to the kids as a bit of family discipleship, and we started with Psalms 23 for kids.

Psalms 23 for kids

We started off using this Psalms 23 file folder game.  Only I didn’t glue it into a file folder, because I’ve come more recently to learn gluing them into the file folder and things like that are somewhat limiting to how we want to use the game.

I hid the Psalms 23 Bible verses all over the room, and the kids happily found the sheep (we were pretending the sheep had wandered off), and looked through the Bible for the correct order of the verses.

Then we went through and looked for what things God did for David in this chapter, and of course talked through our discussion questions.

Acting out Psalms 23

It’s us, of course, we have to act something out, or move something around.  This time we got to learn what it’s like to be a sheep being guided.

I used some cloth from my stash to create a path, and the kids took turns leading the blindfolded sheep.  Mac was sometimes the wild animal that was stopping us from going where God wanted us to, that our good shepherd had to chase away.  Here’s what we learned from this:

Sometimes we are silly sheep, and I feel very sorry for God trying to lead and guide us.  Batman was a very silly sheep who kept falling over (because we’d just watched Dave and the Giant Pickle {affiliate link}), and the poor shepherd was getting very frustrated.  It’s times like this I’m very thankful God is patient, much more patient than I am because I can get frustrated with the kids’ silliness at times.

Sometimes it’s very easy to know where God is leading us.  Because it was a cloth path you could feel if you went off the path (it might have worked better if I’d taped out a path, but this was convenient).  At times it’s blindingly obvious where God wants us to go. This is when we are spending time in God’s Word, and with other believers.

Psalms for Kids resources

• Buck Denver Asks: What’s in the Bible? Volume Eight – Words to Make Us Wise (Psalms, Proverbs & the Writings) {affiliate link}
• David unit study
• Job, Psalms, and Proverbs Pinterest board