How to Involve the Bible in Your Secular Home School Lessons

The Bible, which is God's Word to mankind, is the most outstanding book ever to be written and certainly deserves to have a solid place in any well rounded home school program. Here are some tips to help you see how you can involve the Bible in your secular home school lessons:

1. The Bible is a collection of 66 little books, divided into the Hebrew scriptures (Old Testament) and the Greek scriptures (New Testament). This fact in itself provides the source of hours of fun as your children strive to memorize the order of the books from each section.

Small children quickly learn the names of the first 5 books of the Bible. Then they can easily learn the order of the Gospel accounts of Jesus life and ministry.

Older children enjoy learning the order of the books, and in time, have many laughs as they try to say the books in reverse order. This is a challenging and stimulating activity.

2. Another way to involve the Bible in your secular home school lessons becomes apparent when you realize that the Bible is full of real life, dramatic accounts of the lives of many individuals who serve as both good and bad examples to follow in life. If you are not sure of who some Bible characters are, borrow from a library or purchase a book of Bible stories and familiarize yourself with the accounts.

Choose 4 to 6 characters and create multiple choice questions for the children to answer after you have read them the account of the person's life.

Alternatively, ask the children to create a dramatic play revolving around the details of the person's life. For example, the children could re-enact the account of Noah building the ark, taking the animals into the ark, warning the people of the flood God was soon to bring about and depicting the feelings of the family as they waited for it to start raining.

The children could also enact the events leading up to the birth of Jesus including the announcement to Mary by the angel, Gabriel, that she would bear God's Son, Jesus' birth in the stable and the family's escape to Egypt.

As you become more and more familiar with the varied accounts recorded in the Bible you will start to see a vast array of characters and situations that can be used as the source of innumerable activities across many areas of the curriculum. As this occurs you will also envision how you can involve the Bible in your secular home school lessons.

3. Another stimulating and challenging activity is to create time lines of the major events recorded in the Bible. This activity can cater to small children as they create a timeline of the events of creation or the events in the life of the faithful man, Moses.

Older children can create quite detailed time lines of the world powers that are mentioned throughout the Bible.

4. Another way in which the Bible can be involved in your secular home school lessons is by having the older children research life in ancient cultures at the time that certain events were recorded in the Bible. For example, projects and essays could center around life in Ancient Egypt, Ancient Rome or Ancient Greece.

5. There are many aspects of a wide variety of Geography lessons opened up to you as a home school educator through the pages of the Bible. It is not difficult to locate maps of the countries and towns and villages mentioned in many accounts in the Bible and to find the various locations as mentioned in different accounts. One example is to trace the routes of the Apostle Paul's missionary tours, reading the passages directly from the Bible which outline the difficulties and challenges he faced on these tours. Ask the children how they would fare in shipwrecks and beatings and the other situations faced by Paul.

The above are simply a few of the endless possibilities outlining how you can involve the Bible in your home school lessons.

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