Monday, August 25, 2014

Using Google Images for Kids Bible Studies

The paper sits on this breakfast tray while she colors. When
she's done, she pushes away the paper and takes its place.
My third daughter, 14.5 months old, just began last week having a regular Bible study. She's been sitting in on her sister's "personal prayer time" nearly every day for several months and began "participating" in it semi-regularly for at least a month now. So I began printing coloring pages for her based on whatever story we read to her and her 6yr sister each morning.
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It's all a matter of giving the activity the spin you want it to have. Each morning (well, most mornings...) I have a time of quiet prayer, Scripture reading, and journaling about what God speaks to me through that Scripture reading. I don't expect my children to have the exact same format at the level I do: I pray, meditate, and journal as an adult and they are children still! But I bring those down to their level to teach them a habit I hope they will continue throughout their lives. The prayers are simplified and brought to a higher level as gradually as their meals transition from mashed bananas to adult cuisine.
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The first level of Bible study in our home begins by sitting on a parent's lap listening to a short selection from a Bible storybook and then being offered a picture to color. Eventually the coloring becomes recognizable enough that we buy a cheap notebook and sketch our own drawings in it each day for the child to color. But to begin with not enough crayon actually colors the paper to make the sketches worth my time. So I go to Google Images and type in the story name followed by the words "coloring page". Today I googled "Jesus mount coloring page". I can then copy the image and paste it into my word processor, expand it fill the page, and print. There are a lot of different resources offering coloring pages for different Bible stories, but none that I know of that offer on one website a page for every single Bible story. This enables me to spend only 1 minute searching all those different sites to quickly find a picture fitting the story I've read to my daughter. I do a similar search for my older daughters to find their ideal "princess" or "mermaid" or "pony" or "paper doll" coloring picture. Kinda makes me wonder why I still have so many actual coloring books crowding our bookshelves when they prefer the pictures I find online. ;-)
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Linked with Modest Monday, Works for Me Wednesday

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