Children's Bible Reading

One thing we started almost a year ago as I look in their notebooks was specific Bible reading time for our kiddos in the morning. They each received their own Bible probably a couple of years ago in the NIrV-it's a pretty decent version and easier for them to read although I get tripped up on verses I know well when I read them out of their bibles. Anyways, somewhere I was reading about how Charlotte Mason would have children read their bibles and look for four things so that they were reading with a specific intent:

1. A promise to claim
2. A principle to live by
3. A command to obey
4. A temptation to avoid

So, as we began this reading time, Hannah and Josh are to find one of those four things in their passage that is written in a special notebook for that purpose. The way we do our reading is that their alarms go off at 7:00 during the week, then they are to come upstairs at 7:10 to begin reading (with very little expected to be done in the meantime except get dressed if it is not their shower day). Then we just read till 7:20, they pick out their verse for the day, and I write it under the correct section (each of the four things has it's own section in the notebook). They sometimes will need help finding a good verse pending on what they are reading.

It is amazing to see what they've read over the past 11 months as we do this only on most weekdays: all the gospels, Genesis, Acts, Romans, Revelation, 3.5 other OT books (we just had them read the first half of Daniel), and 5 other NT epistles. We don't do much else with their reading such as discussing it unless they initiate questions-doing that would be a useful addition. We just felt that having them being directly in the Word was a good thing. There have been times where we will be reading in our school Bible time that they will reference something they read personally in their Bibles so they are picking up something.

So, I guess I wanted to share this as an encouragement that even a small amount consistently can add up to a lot of Bible reading over time.

From 2003