Sunday, August 11, 2013

Review: Bible Study Guide for All Ages

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Bible Study Guide For All Ages is a genius curriculum designed so that all ages can study their Bible together.  This is perfect for families with different aged children (like most of us) so you can work through the same material at the same time, but their activities are on their level. There are two ways you can do this - orally, where you just read and discuss together, or with their student pages. This is what we used. We were sent their Intermediate Level Student Pages to review as well as their awesome Bible Books Summary Cards. The Intermediate Level pages are for children in 3rh-4th grade. Since P is going into 3rd grade, and T had just finished 4th when we signed up for this, I ordered the same set for both of them. They have a Beginner set (3-K) and Advanced (5th-6th) that match up with these lessons, but their Primary (1st-2nd) is a different series so I picked Intermediate for both so we could work together.

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There are 416 lessons total in the Bible Study Guide and when completed, you will have covered the entire Bible. I was sent only Unit 1, which includes lessons 1-26. It covers Joseph, Daniel, and part of Jesus' life  on earth. The Units sell for $5.95 each and I received a copy for T and another for P.

There is no teacher's guide for these pages and no artificial source text. I love that they just use the B-I-B-L-E, yes, that's the book for me. Oops. I digress. Each lesson starts with a quick review with "answers" listed below- not the answer-answers, but the Scripture reference of where to find it. This is great so you can pick it up anywhere. If you haven't done the previous lessons, it's ok. It tells you where to find the answers so you can still do the "review." T, P and I would sit with our Bibles out and look up each reference, even if we knew the answer, so we could "prove" that we were correct. This was great for getting the kids looking things up more. Remember Sword Drills, from back in the day? I wish we did those still. This was sort of like that. Whoever found it first got to read it.

After the review, we started on the lesson. The layout of the pages is a little odd, where after the review, you do a Memory Workout (that I will talk about in a bit) and then there is a teaser and then you flip the page over for the lesson. After the lesson, you flip it back to the front page for the rest of the work.  That allows a full page for the lesson, which is nice, but it's a slightly awkward way to do it. No biggie. They have a CD of songs, that we didn't have, but I was able to google some and found some that matched and were usable.

The lessons are designed like a comic, which was highly appealing to my kids. The lesson itself took us about 20 minutes usually. But the before and after work rounded us out around 30-45 minutes. We did this twice a week Most lessons had a timeline on it where the kids put themselves in on today's date, and then added in things relating to the story. I love timelines so I appreciate this. I like the kids to see that the Bible isn't a story - it is History, Truth, Facts, just like they are on the timeline, these events are on the timeline. Other lessons had maps of where the event happened. This tied in well with our CC geography studies.

We saved the "Get Active" section for the end, after we applied it and prayed together. These were fun additions, but some of them were lost on just having two people doing them. They would be great in a Sunday School classroom with more kids, which the curriculum is good for.

 photo bible-book-summary-cards_zps28dfa8ff.jpgNow for my favorite part of this review: The Bible Book Summary Cards. These I loved. They are letter sized flash cards for each book of the Bible. On the front are visual cues and on the back are descriptions and questions. Here is a sample of the front and back of the Exodus cards:

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By us reviewing these together, the kids (and me!) have a better understanding of what is in each book of the Bible. They are nice card stock pages, but I still put them in page protectors so they will last longer. You can use them for putting the books of the Bible in order (mix them up and let the kids arrange them correctly), show the card and have them tell about it, or ask the questions and have them answer. I will be hanging on to these, long after the student pages are done. It tells you which ones to use in the lessons, but I changed it up a little to meet our needs. We introduced them a little faster than they suggested. They are $24.95 for all 66 books. These are keepers!

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