Faith and Family: Memorizing Scripture with the Little Ones

A dear friend and I were talking a few weeks back about fostering our children’s faith, and one of the specifics we talked about was helping our kiddos memorize Scripture.  I’m obviously not any sort of expert on this….but we’re working on it and I’ve found a couple of super great resources to help me!  If you’re interested, here’s what we’re doing (as in my kids and I):

1.  Step Into the Bible --  I started this book with Makenzie before Micah was really old enough to do any memorizing.  It’s a GREAT book –it has short 10 minute or less Bible stories and a Bible verse to memorize with each lesson.  The really great part—the Bible verse stays the same for 5 lessons, so it gives you several days to really get the verse memorized!  Makenzie soaks this book up and even asks to do devotions in the mornings –and she’s done a great job of “keeping” her verses memorized!  Each morning we do a devotion, I’ll have her go through the verses she has previously memorized and usually if I give her the first word or two, she can take off and recite the whole thing.

2.  Another friend recently introduced me to Teaching Children Memory Verses –this is WAY more Micah style than the previous book.  My little man has the attention span of a mosquito…or maybe of a 2 year old boy! By the time I get done reading a devotion, he’s long gone….usually sitting on the floor making growling noises at me or trying to drive his cars over the book I’m reading to Makenzie.  This book is more like Sunday school materials –it has a color sheet/activity to go with each “lesson”….but the lessons are short and the activity is good for keeping attention!  They have these books for various ages --I bought the one for 2 and 3 year olds and it really doesn’t seem to be too young for Makenzie. 

I think my biggest struggle in all of this is that I want it to be grand and elaborate and perfect…..and well, 2 and 4 year olds just don’t go for this!  We’re talking a maximum 5 minutes of good attention.  But here’s what I love –God is faithful!  God made my kids with that 5 minute attention span—and He also made them more than capable of soaking up His word in that timeframe! 

The other struggle is time – 3 days a week we’re racing to get out the door to work and daycare and sometimes that means mom’s yelling at everyone to put their shoes on for the 17th time instead of sitting down to read a devotion or go through a Bible verse.  As much as I wish this wasn’t the case, I think it’s just life….if it wasn’t work and daycare it would be something else….one more year and we’ll be racing off to Kindergarten in the mornings.  (Man that’s hard to actually type out….I’m definitely not ready for that!)  The 2nd book is great for this –just this week, I gave the kids a coloring sheet at 7:45 am, we talked about the verse while I fed Gracyn and they colored, loaded up at 8:00 and practiced the verse as we drove to daycare.  They weren’t fighting, I wasn’t crabbing—and they LOVED it!  Both kids insisted on taking their coloring sheets to Trinity to show their friends and teachers.  I’m thinking “Memory Verse Mondays” are going to become a regular occurrence at our house because I’d much rather have my kids going out the door with a verse in their head than a replay of me telling them to put their shoes on/brush their teeth/ stop fighting etc. etc.

Moms - I’d love to hear your ideas—how do you do Scripture with your kids??