Learning the Lay of the Land

I'm taking a class these days on holiness and we're starting, not surprisingly, by reading a number of passages from throughout the Bible, including both Old Testament and New Testament. I found myself thinking of Bible drills, a.k.a. "sword drills," in children's Sunday School and VBS.

Carol told me awhile back about some of her time teaching young children, probably around kindergarten age, maybe even pre-school. She gave them a great start by introducing them to the Bible and helping them begin to know their way around it even before they could read. She taught them about the Old Testament and the New Testament. They learned that Genesis was first, and Revelation was at the end, and Psalms was around the middle that starts with "Ps," which is really weird in English. They knew about the gospels, too, and could find those. Pretty good for pre-readers, eh?

The Bible is a big book, and much larger than any of the others children usually read before late elementary school or beyond. That can be pretty intimidating, but Carol gave them tools to navigate it and began to develop in them a love for scripture from a very young age. What an incredible gift!