Teaching Bible to Children
We hear so much about age-appropriateness when we teach young children, and in my personal opinion it is terribly overrated. Children are naturally curious and are often capable of learning more than the carefully calculated educational standards that are dished out to teachers today. In the early days of education with one-room schoolhouses, students in the lower grades heard the older students lessons and often learned the material before it was officially presented to them.
The same situation is present when it comes to teaching Bible stories to children. I like to see children given the opportunity to learn more than bare details of a story. They deserve an opportunity to hear more whether they remember all of the details or not.
A case in point, last summer during Bible school I was to portray Noah’s wife to the children. The story had been stripped down to the bare essentials and a big deal was made over how crowded the animals would have been on the ark. Needless to say I re-wrote my script. As I saw it, not only was the story overly simplified, it was told in a way that encouraged disbelief.
I knew I couldn’t add too much more to the story given the amount of time available for the presentation, but I did give them reasons why they could believe the story – given a few simple facts – that the ark was one and a half times as long as a football field and it was three stories high. I personally believe children need to hear the whole story at a much younger age.
There was a time when the Bible was the first reader children knew. I’m not trying to imply that we go to that extreme with teaching reading, but am saying that children could be introduced to the actual Bible text at an earlier age than is the norm today.
Earlier this week I told the story of David and the Big Bully (Goliath) on my personal blog, Honeycomb Adventures Press. I was under a self-imposed word count of under 500 words, so I still left out many details, but in telling the story I kept the most important part intact – that David’s confidence came from knowing that God was with him and that he could defeat Goliath as easily as the Israelites defeated Jericho when the walls came tumbling down.
I would love to hear your reaction to my position of introducing more Bible at an earlier age. Please share your views in the comments below. And if you read David and the Big Bully, I would appreciate a similar discussion of age appropriateness there as well.
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