Getting God's Word into Your Child's Schoolwork

As I was working with my second grader this morning, I realized that I needed to share with y'all another way to get God's Word into your child's heart, this time using their schoolwork.

This works perfectly for homeschoolers, but it will also work if your kids are in school. It only takes a few minutes, but it will allow you to get into the Word with them in a very different way. I like this, because it shows us just how practical the Scriptures can be for everyday life. It is not an in-depth Bible study though, so if that's what you need, go read this post and this one.

My daughter, Courtney, is in second grade. At the beginning of the year, I found a 90 day Bible reading plan for children. It has 90 readings that give a good overview of the entire Bible. Today, she read aloud to me chapter 15 of Genesis. She is a good strong reader, but there were a lot of words in this chapter that she needed help with!

In her language arts, she is using the Explode the Code books. Book 4, which she is in, has been teaching her about compound words and words with endings like "-ing, -ness, and -ful." Today, we used the Bible chapter to reinforce these lessons. Here's what that looked like...

After reading the chapter in its entirety, I had her open up her Language Arts notebook and turn to a clean sheet of notebook paper. At the top, I wrote "Compound Words and Endings from Genesis 15." We started back at verse 1, and I had her scan the verses for any word that was either a compound word, or had an ending on it. Then I had her write them on her paper, one word per line, after she told me whether it was compound or had an ending. If it was a compound word, she had to tell me what two words were in it. If it had an ending, she had to tell me the root word and what the ending was.



Her list

After that, I took the Bible and had her try to spell the word without looking again, so we also incorporated some spelling lessons in there. The other thing I did was reinforce dropping the "e" when you add "ing". She had the words "smoking" and "blazing", so she spelled the root word for me, then said, "Drop the "e" and add "ing".

This all took maybe fifteen minutes at the most. I scanned the verses, and if there was no compound words or endings for several verses, I let her skip on ahead to where the next one was; but I did not tell her what it was. I had her start at the beginning of a verse so she could find it herself.

Now, you could do a whole lot more with this for older kids. You could study semi-colons, commas, quotation marks, paragraph structure, punctuation (just don't use Proverbs or Psalms for that), spelling, and vocabulary.



Courtney had a blast doing this! Sometimes, just using something different is all it takes to put a sparkle back in the eye of your child. And it reinforced what she had just read. I don't use something like this every single day, but I could. I will definitely use it more often now that I see how much she liked it!

You could use this with a child just learning their letters even. Pick a few verses and have them search for the letter they are working on. Then let them write the word out that starts with it. I love to use a dry erase board for stuff like this; when a child isn't ready for notebook paper, but wants to write like "a big kid".

I'd love to hear your ideas and ways you have incorporated the Bible into your schoolwork...


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