Some Ideas About Teaching the Bible in School

 ….These words, which I command you this day, shall be in your heart:

And you shall teach them diligently unto your children, and shall talk of them when you sit in your house, and when you walk by the way, and when you lie down, and when you rise up.

Duet. 6:6,7

                I am in charge of a church Bible study program and it seems we could put a little more enthusiasm into our Bible study effort. It is harder to study if you have not developed the proper tools needed. Where is a better place to start developing this tool box for Bible study than in school. I may write a longer article on this important subject, but today I am going to list a few ideas for your consideration. These are some projects I have done or hope to do this year:

1. Memorize some of the key passages of the Bible.
2. Have a quote competition where you say a Bible quote and they have to guess who said it
3. Parse or rewrite Bible verses in the students own words. Do it in small groups then read them out loud. Have them use a dictionary and thesaurus  
4. Read Bible stories out of an easier to read translation like the NIV. Look up interesting facts, archeology, or even cultural facts about the story.
5. Write modern stories loosely based on the structure of Bible stories. For instance, I hand each student three different Bible stories to choose from. If they have Joesph—they would write a story about a brother who was betrayed by his brothers and yet spared and helped them later in a time of need. This helps them to see the concept, pattern, and context of the Bible stories that can be relevant even to us today.
6. Sword drill- Pick a key word or topic and find a list of those verses in a concordance or topical Bible. Have the students look up verses that you dictate to them until they can guess which topic or keyword they have in common. I often make teams and keep points.
7. Learn books of the Bible
8. Have each student keep a notebook where you daily or weekly write down verses, quotes, or what you learned for devotions.  
9. Bible Pictionary- Have teams try to draw pictures to guess Bible characters or verses or stories
10. Diagram Bible Verses- Very important for more indepth Bible study. Diagram the verses you memorize. Look up block diagraming.
11. Get a Bible Trivia book
12. Have a student do a report on assigned books of the Bible. Thompson chain reference Bible has a lot of aids down this line.
13. Do reports on different characters of the Bible
14. Have a map quiz on the main geo features and towns of the Bible land. Have a two blank map test where they write in the past and present countries or cities of the region.
15. Have groups do a study on a verse and learn how to look up cross references
16. Have students do reports on Ancient Egyptian, Babylon, Alexander the Great and the Greeks, the Maccabees (See Josephus), Ancient Rome, the Fall of Jerusalem and create a timeline to help students make a connection with the Bible’s historical context