Three Tips for Bringing the Bible to Life with Children
Twenty years ago, Saint Mary’s Press discovered a sad reality. Our research indicated that Catholic young people didn’t know how to find things in the Bible, they weren’t familiar with its important people and events, and they did not know how to discover its spiritual truths. Most heart wrenching, because of this lack of basic biblical skills and understandings, they were unable to truly know and love the Word of God. The Bible became a big, intimidating book that sat on a shelf.
So in 1999, compelled by our mission to touch the hearts and minds of young people with the Good News, we hatched a two-pronged plan. First, we created The Catholic Youth Bible to provide unique helps to build biblical ease and knowledge (literacy). We followed that with two other Bibles that were designed for middle school and elementary-aged children.
Second, to respond to the need for continuing to build biblical literacy, we created an educational scaffold that ties into all the biblical products we create. We call this scaffold the ABCs of biblical literacy.
1. Have children use the Bible regularly! (Give them access)
Many children do not know how to use the Bible. They may have heard Bible stories, and maybe they were even given a Bible for their First Communion. But they do not know how the Bible is structured or how to discover specific passages or stories within it. By focusing on the competencies of the Access goal, we can help our children become more familiar and comfortable with the Bible.
The most critical practice for achieving the Access goal—a practice so basic that many people overlook it—is simply having the children use the Bible. Too often children read Scripture passages as quotations in their textbooks. There may be only one Bible in the classroom, so the catechist or teacher looks up the passage and then hands the opened Bible to a young person to read. These practices do not encourage children to learn how to find Bible passages or to understand how the Bible is organized.
So, the first practical tip is to have child-friendly, complete Bibles available in every classroom and have the children use them—regularly! We’ve learned that even young children can look up passages and discover stores with the guidance of skilled and patient catechists and teachers. What we model has a much greater impact than what we simply say!
Let’s be honest, it isn’t just having Bibles in our children’s classrooms, it is also the type of Bibles we have available. Children quickly lose interest in a text-only, hard-to-read Bible. Our testing affirms that visually rich Bibles, with child-friendly fonts and an age appropriate reading level, draw children in and stimulate their interest.
2. Introduce children to key Bible people and events (Give them the big picture
There’s a reason that the Catechism essentially begins with an overview of salvation history (#290–682). Much of Catholic theology is based on the presumption that we know and understand this overarching story of God’s saving work. Understanding how each biblical book’s story fits into this bigger history is the mark of a truly biblically literate person.
This kind of knowledge grows with repetition and review. You can help children to develop this knowledge by regularly exposing them to people and events in Scripture.
So, our second practical tip is to have an intentional plan for reading about these key people and events and reading about them from the Bible throughout your elementary curriculum. Your children’s understanding of salvation history will deepen as they discover these people and grow to love their stories.
The Catholic Children’s Bible helps you to do this by focusing on 125 key people and events in the Featured Stories on two-page spreads. The use of these spreads will develop as the child’s reading ability develops. With very young children, adults can read the stories in these spreads to them. As the children grow older, they can read and discover these stories and their meaning on their own. Using these Featured Stories consistently with children will provide an excellent foundation for knowing and understanding salvation history.
3. Use two questions to help children interpret what they read (Give them context)
While it is not always developmentally appropriate to introduce young children to the nuances of biblical interpretation, we can introduce them to general principles of biblical interpretation. The most basic of those principles comes from the Vatical II document, Dei Verbum (The Word of God). It says, “the interpreter of Sacred Scripture, in order to see clearly what God wanted to communicate to us, should carefully investigate what meaning the sacred writers really intended, and what God wanted to manifest by means of their words” (#12).
Two simple questions can help get at this two-step process of biblical interpretation:
- What is this Bible story about? What do you think the person writing this was trying to say?
- What is God reaching us through this story?
Consistently asking these two questions plants the seed that there was a human author writing the Bible’s stories and that God is speaking to us through their words. In discussing these stories, catechists and teachers can bring in insights based on other contextual clues: the literary genres used, the relationship between the two Testaments, the culture of the time, the Church’s Tradition, and so on.
Want a handout? Download the pdf version here.
