Homeschooling As I discussed in a prior post, Bible memory is a very important part of our family devotions. It is a discipline we believe has a lasting impact even on our young children. It’s a discipline we believe we will reap the benefits of for the rest of our lives. Here are my tips for Bible memory for children.
We begin Bible memorization with our boys as soon as they are able to put sentences together. It seems like this was around 2 years old for both Bradley and Cameron. We begin working through full chapters or large portions of chapters with our children and shy away from individual verses (though there are exceptions).
Some have skeptically asked how children so young can be expected to memorize long portions of scripture, to which we heartily respond that childhood is the perfect time to memorize scripture. Young children are like sponges. They retain a vast amount of information with relative ease.
Our Technique for Bible Memory for Children
The technique we use with our children is the same as we use ourselves. It really isn’t anything fancy. First, we choose a passage we’d like to work on as a family. Then, we begin by going over the first verse or the first part of the first verse if it happens to be a long verse.
We go over that several times and have the kids repeat after us. As nights progress, we quiz each other on the segment. When most of us seem to have it, we then add the next portion of scripture, continuing to recite what we have already mastered. We continue in this manner until we have the whole passage memorized.
We recite the scripture during our family bedtime devotions and the kids and I work on the passage first thing in the morning as part of the first school subject of the day: memory time. We use the Charlotte-mason memory system, for many more things than just Bible memory, and we’ve found it has really helped us move information into our long term memory.
If you are looking for some good passages to start with for Bible memory for children, the following is a list of a few our family has worked on: Psalm 1, Psalm 130, Psalm 131, and Romans 12.
I’d urge you to begin scripture memory as a family now! Helping your children learn this discipline young is ideal. Don’t be intimidated by longer passages. Even if it takes you a year or more to memorize a chapter, the spiritual rewards you will reap are worth the time and effort.
We would enjoy hearing more from you, our readers. What scriptures have you enjoyed memorizing with your children? Are there any tricks or tips you have for helping you kids (or yourself) memorize the Bible?
Good idea. Found you on Blessed Beyond Words Hop Hope you’ll swing by my blog as well.
Sandy
Cherished Handmade Treasures
Children really are capable of more than we give them credit for! I’m starting Scripture memory myself and hope to teach it to my son when he is able!
That’s so true. I learned that with my first son. I was going over my scripture memory hoping he’d absorb just a bit of it, but found he was able at a very young age to memorize faster than I could!
Love our CM style memory box. Have you seen my printable dividers? Thanks for sharing with kids in the word at ThePelsers.com
I haven’t seen your dividers, but I’ll have to go check them out now. Thanks for the heads up 🙂
My kiddos participate in Awana and learn verses through that program. I truly love it! I learn right along with them and recall to memory the ones that I knew already 😉 Thanks for linking up today! Blessings!
We have also done Awana the past couple of years. My oldest son has really enjoyed it!
We’ve really been working hard-er on bible memory lately, and too seeing how quickly they can do large portions! I am excited to have them working, and me alongside, on almost whole chapters :0) This is a great encouragement for people to get on it!
Bible memory is top on our list of priorities, too. What a well written post. I found you via Preschool Corner. Am I seeing correctly? Do you have two older boys and twin boys? I do, too. 🙂
Thank you! And yes we have FOUR boys: 8, 3, and twin 13 month olds. How funny you have four with twins too!
Found you on the Homeschool Creations Blog hop. We’ve had our kids memorize scripture from a young age as well, though I admit not long passages like you. We pretty much use the same method you do, practice it one little bit at a time, quizzing each other.
I agree! The one thing I’ve found is that if we don’t review, it moved right out of the memory though =) We use the Charlotte Mason method too and I LOVE it! It definitely helps with the long term retention. THank you for sharing this with us at Trivium Tuesdays!
Your children will have an awesome mental scripture library to glean from when they are older! Wish I had spent more time on this when my kids were little.
I never knew how the Charlotte Mason memory system worked before. Thank you for the link. It sounds like a great way to go about memorizing as a family! I use memverse.com regularly, which is a free Bible memorization site that uses a very similar approach. The main difference is that you type the verses to practice them.
Our family does a fairly large amount of Scripture memorization, but generally we do most of the “work” on our own and help each other with “testing” — the funny thing is, then we learn much of what each other is memorizing, too. 🙂
I wrote a blog post not too long ago called “7 Tips for teaching young children memory verses.” Of course, a lot of the tips help older children and us adults, too!
I have generally used short verses/passages with the little ones, increasing over time; but I can certainly see why you might start with longer passages, too.
God bless you!
~Sheila 🙂
Hi Sheila,
Thanks for stopping by! I look forward to checking out the post you linked to. I’m always looking for more tips on helping my kids (and myself) with memory work.
I just found your blog and I love the content I found here. I too am passionate about teaching my kids how to memorize God’s Word and how to make it a part of their life. I have started a blog with free tools for Bible memory. You can view it at http://clubhousekidz.wordpress.com/ There is a post at the bottom of the page entitled “30 ways to make Bible memory fun for your kids” Thanks so much for the great ideas you’ve posted on this site. Keep up the good work.
Thanks for passing along that resource. I’ll be sure to check it out 🙂
Great post! Kids, especially very young ones, are so often underestimated. I just wrote a post about how we work with our toddlers on Bible memory. We started with single verses but now that we have some grade-school-aged kids everyone works on full passages together. http://familyabounds.blogspot.com/2013/09/5-ways-to-memorize-scripture-with-your.html
That’s great! Thanks so much for sharing your post. I’ll be sure to stop by to check it out. I’m always looking for new things to add to our Bible Memory Techniques 🙂
Just wondering what version of the Bible you use for memorization? 🙂
We typically use ESV. We’ve also used the NASB.
What version do you use?
English Standard Version (ESV)