As sad as it sounds, I never had a firm understanding of the Bible, its chronology, who was who and who did what until I was an adult. Sure I’d heard all the stories and even knew them pretty well, but they never "fit" together in my mind until I took a journey through The Child’s Story Bible by Cynthia Vos with my firstborn.

Since then, it’s like I have a new lightbulb on in my head as I read through my Bible. Because of her thoroughness in retelling the Old and New Testament and her chronological approach, I am now much more of a Bible scholar in my own studies. Not to mention the amazing understanding my children have!

Our family is now on a second journey through The Child’s Story Bible because a second child is ready to learn from it. This time, I’ve added a great resource to go along with the readings. The Big Picture Bible Time Line is a pre-made, reproducible time line of most significant happenings in the Bible. It goes along very well with the story Bible.

For our purposes, I copy each page at 50%, then cut out the smaller image. My children color the time line event that goes with the current story, then we tape them to the wall. Each child has their own time line going. We’ve almost finished reading through the Old Testament. Once that’s done, we’ll review the everything we’ve learned using the time lines, then I’ll take them down and add them to our history notebooks.

Here’s a picture of a small part of the time lines.

The entire Old Testament will end up being about 20 feet long. That’s why we’ll take these down before starting the New Testament time lines. If you don’t have wall space, they could easily be kept in a notebook. Have fun!

A couple of years ago, I was looking for a way to gently incorporate more Bible study and character training into our day.  As I was reading aloud one day from a picture book it hit me.  “Almost every book we read has some sort of moral lesson in it.  I can use these to bring more Bible into our day!” 

So, very simply, after Bible time, I started reading a “Bible Book of the Day”.  That’s what we called it anyway.  My kids were still pretty young, so each day brought a new picture book.  It was their job to decide what good or bad quality was portrayed in the story.  We would talk about the quality, then using For Instruction In Righteousness, we would look up a couple of verses or talk about a Bible story that went along with the quality. 

My kids loved this approach!  They felt very wise as they “diagnosed” a book character’s problem.  Little did they know, I usually picked books with characters who were dealing with some of the same problems we had around here!  Anybody ever hear of The Little Red Hen’s lazy friends???

Hey, I think I’ve just talked myself into doing Bible Books of the Day again!  This time we’ll probably use chapter books.  Maybe we’ll even find some characters who change from bad to good over the course of the story.  Won’t that be fun!
 

Related Tags: Bible, character training, literature

Thank you to all who voted for me in the Homeschool Blog Awards!!  I came in SIXTH in the Best Crafts, Plans and Projects Blog.  Wow!!!  Thank you, Thank you, Thank you!

I was visiting www.letawomanlearn.blogspot.com and came across some wonderful Bible map sites.  Enjoy!

http://www.blueletterbible.org/images_maps.html

http://www.biblecharts.org/index.htm

http://www.godweb.org/atlasindex.htm

http://www.unc.edu/awmc/mapsforstudents.html