I grew up in the church, so I grew up singing a combination of classic church hymns and the latest praise and worship songs. You can’t be in the church long without hearing the story behind Amazing Grace, and being aware that many of the classic hymns have amazing stories behind them. In homeschooling circles you’ll find lots of people talk about doing a hymn study. It’s always been on my list of things to do, and I kept putting it off as a homeschool Bible lesson because I didn’t want to do the requisite research to do a hymn study. Then my friend Judy said she had a hymn study and I said, “Sweet, now the work is done for me.”
(Judy gave me a copy of her hymn study and it’s an affiliate link, opinions still my own)
Why you should do a hymn study
In the current church world, we have a tyranny of the now (this is a problem outside of the church, but that’s not in the scope of this post). We are disconnected from our past. In our churches, we sing the Top 40 songs from K-Love or some other radio station, and an occasional verse from Amazing Grace might leak into our song. We consume, but we don’t think.
A hymn study causes us to go back and think about the why behind the song and the lyrics. We learn about the composer and their life. We learn Christianity didn’t burst into being with the creation of Hillsong music and tweetable sermons (not that either of those is bad in and of themselves, I like me a good quote, but it’s different).
We learn how other Christians dealt with the good times and the bad times. We are not alone in the problems we have.
How this hymn study is set up
Each of the hymns has a background of how and why the hymn was written. At the end of the story, there are links to the song and the sheet music. Then there are copywork pages for a verse tied to the song and for each of the verses of the song. There are also vocabulary pages, comprehension pages, and more. I actually have to keep coming back in and editing this paragraph because I’ve forgotten something that’s included in the study.
Something I wish I had grabbed with the hymn study when we did it back then, was 101 Hymn Stories.
Now my family, because my kids are more or less all in the same age/ability level, is not going to get full use out of this unit study because there is all manner of different copywork pages. There are manuscript pages from beginner to advanced level and the same for cursive. I printed out the beginner cursive pages because I’d noticed my kids slacking in the cursive department recently, and I wanted to give them a quick reminder before using the advanced pages.
Brief break for some other great church history ideas
I try to incorporate church history into our Bible lessons from time to time, so I give you:
- Fruit of the Spirit lesson– covering a hero of the faith who embodies that idea
- Armor of God lesson (that was not the lesson I was thinking of, clearly I need to get that written now)
- Saint Francis of Assissi
To which, my daughter complained, “I don’t need these pages, I could just use the smaller lines.” I then pointed out a couple of spots where she had written her letters wrong, and she got quiet. It’s been a good catch-up for the kids, and now when I start us on the next one in a week or so (they’re only doing a page of the copywork, so it’s not overwhelming in a day), I’ll print off the smaller lined pages for the next hymn.
Get your own copy of the Hymn Study
hymn study is $10.
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