I’ve stopped running the Thoughtful Thursdays party as I am not able to promote it as I used to do weekly and it’s hard for me to get a party up on Thursday mornings after teaching all day on Wednesday and having church on Wednesday night.
I would come home on Wednesday night so tired, try to write a post, and then go to bed and set my alarm to wake up early to do it before school on Thursday. Since I am not able to spend time blogging like I used to be able to do, my readership has gone down. I will still write posts that God lays on my heart as I go along, but I’m going to try to be methodical by hopefully writing more series of posts. Then, hopefully, I can clean up my old posts and organize series so that they are easy to find. I may spend time this summer doing that.
One thing I have done this school year is teach the book produced by Apologia called Who is God? And Can I Really Know Him? for our group Bible class of six students ranging from 3rd grade – 8th grade. I am not good at using the notebooks that correspond with the hardback textbook as there were many activities I didn’t want to use. The way I taught it is that I just read the text, we talked about it as I went along, and I made outlines with blanks they could fill in as we went through each chapter.
Our school only has classes on Monday – Thursday; and on Monday and Thursday, we have chapel for 15 minutes. This means we only meet for Bible for 15 minutes on those days. Then on Tuesday and Wednesday we spend 30-45 minutes on Bible. I allowed three weeks for each chapter, which means that it took 30 weeks to get through one book, and we had about 34 weeks of school. The week before Christmas, we did Christmas readings; the week before spring break, I read some Patricia St. John short stories from her book, Stories to Share; and the last couple weeks of school, I may read a Patricia St. John book to them for fun.
Usually on Monday, we just went over the verse they were learning for the week, they recited the verse that was due that Monday (or took the test), and we went over the one to two catechisms that they were learning from The Shorter Catechism. These catechisms would be tested on the chapter tests. So they would have a verse due after the first week going through a chapter; they would have a verse due after the second week going through a chapter; and after the third week, the chapter would be done and there would be a test that next Monday.
Chapter 1 test has a study sheet at the end of the outline that the kids could use to study for the test. Starting with chapter 2, I would make the test from the outline that I had given them; so on the Thursday before the test, we would go through and they would highlight what they needed to study. That way, I didn’t have to make a study sheet for them. Since I have multiple ages, this made it easy for even the younger kids to study for the tests. As I went along, I kept tweaking things. For instance, in chapters 7 and 8, I included a third page of the test that was much harder and only middle school had to do that page.
The other thing that only middle school had to do were the Make Note of It sections. In the book, there are sections called, “Make Note of It.” It asks questions for discussion or for students to write down answers. I shared with the middle school a google doc that they could fill out, and then I would print them out and grade them. We would also discuss these sections on Monday as that is when they were due for a grade. I will share the separate document for the “Make Note of It” assignments for chapter one at the bottom of this post.
I will share these printables for free with you, but these do not in any way replace the book. They are of no use to you if you do not buy the book. Almost every chapter has a story in it that illustrates the truth that was being taught in the chapter. That was the kids favorite part of the chapters. The book also a code where you can print off resources that go with the book. The book includes different articles of interesting information and much more detail than I provided in my outline — these outlines are truly just outlines to keep the kids with me, paying attention, and a tool I could use to help the children study for their tests.
These outlines are not editable if you just click on the link. You would need to click on the link which would take you to my Google document. Then you would need to click on “File” and under “File” click on “Make a Copy.” After you make your own copy, you can edit your copy. Then if you don’t want the catechisms or verses on your copy, you can remove those items.
