When God gave the command to parents and the community to teach children, the core of that was to teach them to “Love the Lord your God” (Deuteronomy 6:4-9). Rather than attempting to introduce every story of Scripture, we would do well to prepare children for meat by building a foundation of love for God and familiarizing them with stories from each section of God’s big story.
Why It’s Important to Help Kids Study the Bible
This journey starts with a child’s love to have stories read to them. Begin with books that introduce the concept that God loves them. As he grows into a toddler and then preschooler, read simplified stories from the Bible. Remember, your priority is to give him a familiarity with the stories of the Bible and to help lay the foundation of recognizing God’s character. You want to show how God is the hero of the story and emphasize His ongoing presence, protection, and promises.
It’s appropriate that these stories are just good stories to your child—stories he loves and wants to hear again and again. You’re helping him fall in love with the Bible, and, by extension, fall in love with God and His Kingdom. For a preschool child it’s less about teaching them to read the Bible and more about giving him a love for the stories of the Bible, which will lead to a desire to read them for himself as he gets older.
How to Help Kids Study the Bible as They Grow
As children begin to learn to read, what better way to have them practice their skills than to read the stories of the Bible? Begin with Bible storybooks that have simplified the language and sentence structure and use age-appropriate vocabulary words. As their reading abilities develop, you can have your child practice reading these stories to you. The habits they develop at an earlier age when someone reads them the stories of the Bible—maybe for a bedtime story every night—can continue. They can now take the lead when it comes to reading those stories. There’s a sense of discovery that they’ll find in these stories as they read them as opposed to just listening to them. This helps develop the discipline to spend time in God’s Word every day.
Help Kids Study the Bible Through Reading Practice
Around age seven a child can transition from Bible storybooks to reading a young reader’s version of the Bible. One example is the New International Reader’s Version (NIrV), which takes the translation work done for the New International Version and simplifies the sentence structure. Instead of compound sentences with lots of prepositional phrases, the sentences are simplified to a third grade reading level. This helps build confidence in a child that she, too, can read the Bible and understand it. At this time, she can learn Bible skills such as listing the books of the Bible in order and locating chapters and verses on her own. This is an important proactive step to take because it will help her take ownership in studying the Bible.
By the time children reach their preteen years, they can begin to understand the concept of Bible translation and recognize how different English translations tell the same story with different wording and sentence structure.
Introducing Bible Translations to Kids
Introduce them to the different approaches to Bible translation and explain why their great-grandparents might prefer one translation, while their ministry leaders use a different one. Have them read different translations of the same text to compare and allow them to choose the translation they want to use for their own personal study.
Helping Kids Understand Bible Translation
The “Bible Knowledge and Skills” chart provides an outline for parents and ministry leaders to follow in building confidence in Bible reading in childhood. Building Biblical Interpretation Skills We don’t live in the cultures that the stories of the Old or New Testament took place in. Some of the descriptions and illustrations used in the Bible do not make sense to kids living more than two thousand years after the events of Jesus’ life on earth. So, as a child begins to read Scripture on their own, equip them with the resources to understand and interpret God’s Word properly.
During their elementary years, introduce children to resources that help explain the content and vocabulary of the Bible. A Bible dictionary with pictures and images helps children understand the setting and context for the stories they’re reading. Seeing an image of a first-century home helps the story of Jesus healing the paralytic make a lot more sense (How did they get on the roof?). A Bible atlas with maps and pictures of locations helps enhance and solidify what they are learning. These resources also help connect the stories in the Bible to what they’re learning in social studies class. All these things bring to life the stories they’re reading in new ways. Give young disciples access to Bible apps or Bible resource websites so they can investigate on their own.
As he shows a growing interest in learning more about the Bible, there are some steps of biblical interpretation a child can do with every Bible story. He can use the Five Ws and an H (who, what, when, where, why, and how) pattern to identify the elements of the story. Once he has read the text and located the answers to these questions, he can list which elements of the story are confusing to him. He can identify the differences between the culture described in the Bible passage and the culture of today. Guide him in using resources to discover answers to his own questions, rather than giving him the answer.
Developing Biblical Interpretation Skills in Kids
As they mature into preteens, children can expand into reading a greater variety of biblical texts. Introduce them to the different genres of Scripture and how knowing the genre of a passage affects your interpretation of it. The poetry found in a psalm is to be interpreted differently than a command in a Gospel. The letters of the New Testament contain guidance for how we’re to live as Christ followers but also provides commands that were specific for the culture of the time or for a specific congregation. Parables provide insight into the Kingdom of God, while prophecies remind the people of God about God’s past commands and their future reality. Knowing these differences helps children understand how to read and interpret texts accordingly.
Preteens can learn how to research a biblical concept or theological words by reviewing its range of use in Scripture. They can compare parallel passages in the Gospels or connect a psalm to the historical event that inspired its creation. By locating events on a Bible timeline, they can see more clearly the unfolding of God’s story throughout history and the patterns of God’s faithfulness. They can learn to read Scripture amid a literary, historical, and cultural context so they can discover what the text meant at the time it was written.
Preteens will enjoy the process of mastering the knowledge they have been accumulating—practice makes perfect, as the saying goes. As they practice their interpretive muscles, they can move toward application to their own lives. As with everything during the preteen age, children need to be able to put into practice the things they’ve learned with the guidance of a caring adult. It’s difficult to stand back and watch them stumble through things, but it’s a big mistake to rush in and do it for them. Let them stumble and learn on their own. Remember, the goal is to help a child develop their own faith, and if they can build confidence in putting the things they’ve learned into practice, it’ll stick with them for the rest of their lives.
Taken from Raising Disciples: Guiding Your Kids into a Faith of Their Own by Teresa Roberts. Copyright © 2024. Used by permission of NavPress. All rights reserved. Represented by Tyndale House Publishers, Inc.
