Thursday, December 17, 2009

Read and Learn -- Children's Curriculum and the Great Stories

Last week Jan Edmiston of A Church for Starving Artists posted about trying to find a curriculum for use with children that taught the great Bible stories. For most of Christian (and Jewish) history the Bible stories were extremely well known. Most people weren't literate. The stories were read in church, they were depicted in public art. They were memorable.

I grew up in Sunday School using a story based approach to the Bible. Some of my earliest church memories are of coloring pictures of the stories while the teacher read the story aloud to us. I grew up and read those stories in context. So, I know where they are in the Bible and how they fit into the story. A lot of the people I grew up with know the stories, but they don't know the context. To them the stories are isolated snippets that they can't visualize in a bigger picture. Then, we have a lot of people younger than I am who just never learned them at all.

So, what do we do about this? Read Jan's post and the comments there, any ideas?

JusticeSeeker
JusticeSeekerOK@aol.com

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