Bible as part of our Home Education

As always it happens that this topic will be the one for submission to the CM carnival. Not because of any planning on my part, rather HE has HIS hand in what comes about in our lives.

I've been spending time refreshing my memory of my reading of Miss Mason's Volume One by perusing the chapter by chapter summaries over at the AmbleSide website.

"We are wrong if we assume that children are too young to enjoy the Bible unless we water it down for them. We don't know how God's spirit will work with each child, and we presume too much by keeping scripture from them because of their age."

Can I just admit that I have been reading for official Bible Lesson time from a child's Bible book. I am doing so in order to give my son a general overview of the Bible stories most children hear in sundayschool .... even when we attended a church where such things mattered, my son was not interested in going in a classroom without mommy. With that in mind he missed those early years of as Miss Mason would call it "watered down" versions of Bible stories. I saw nothing wrong with giving him this brief overview of Bible characters in such a manner. Although I do enjoy reading aloud because I can use the names Jesus and Yeshua interchangably and if there are any church(aka man's) doctrines that have been written into this children's Bible storybook, I can be sure and refute those on the spot.

"By age nine, children should have been read "the simple and suitable narrative portions of the old Testament and, say, two of the Gospels." Paraphrases are not necessary, children can learn to appreciate the beauty of the King James text."

Next week we will read the last 5 stories in the Bible storybook and then it's on to the list of Testament and Renewed Testament stories as listed. Of course I also want to spend 2 weeks on a fruit of the Spirit study as well. Of interest I recently read that the KJV is a 3rd grade reading level so no-one should say "it's too hard"...((grin)) *Ruth Beechick in World History Made Simple

"Children don't bring into their minds the kind of questions we adults have about the authenticity of scripture. They are able to take it at face value. They can work out their own perception of whether the stories are literal or allegorical later."

We've recently been reading in Exodus along with the weekly Torah portions and the kids of the group we get together to discuss with are very simplistic in their understanding of the reading. For example pharaoh's heart being hardened and the Word saying God hardened his heart and thus brought about the plagues and such. With the adults we were getting deep and talking is this calvinism since it says God hardened his heart so that means no use praying for anything((even salvation??)) since it's all up to God and how Moses says just a 3 day journey was that a lie so it's ok to lie and on and on us adults could go. The kids age 10 and under were like God is just showing us HE's bigger and smarter than we are. They weren't as concerned with all the ramifications, if I may use such a word, involved in this passage. Don't they call that childlike faith?!!

I want to end with a line from the summary of page 247 that I particularly like.

"...a verse or two at a time, should also be memorized because we don't know what stored scripture God may use sometime later in a child's life."