Using Bible stories in your lockdown homeschooling

My daughter has been homeschooling her three children for years. So the current situation hasn’t made any difference to their schooling. But if the statistics often quoted in the papers are true—that only 25% of children who would normally go to school are receiving much instruction at home—then there is obviously a need that needs addressing!

So whether you are finding homeschooling difficult or easy, I have an idea that you can use. It’s an idea that combines several different disciplines. It’s an idea that uses the Bible. And I’d like to think it’s an idea that your child will enjoy—maybe even call “fun”.

I’ll use my new book—The Prisoners, the Earthquake, and the Midnight Song—to explain how to do it. But, frankly, you could use the same idea with any Bible retelling. The Good Book Company has plenty to choose from. And I have written plenty, as well.

Begin with the Bible

You’ll need to start with the Bible itself. Read your child the passage upon which the retelling is based. In the case of The Prisoners, the Earthquake, and the Midnight Song, that will be Acts 16 v 16-40.

As soon as you have done that, tell them you are going to read the book itself, and ask them to listen for any differences between the book and what they have heard from the Bible. As you will see, this retelling sticks very closely to what the Bible says, but it is shaped differently. If your child can’t pick it out for themselves, you might want to draw their attention to all of the “sounds” in the story—all that the reader is encouraged to “listen” to. In fact, you could make those sounds—or, better still, have them make the sounds with you—as the story progresses.

Then ask your child why they think the author of the retelling chose to tell the story in the way he or she did. Why did they make the choices they made? Why did they emphasise one part of the story and place less emphasis on another? In the case of The Prisoners, The Earthquake, and the Midnight Song, you might want to ask why I repeated these lines:

“Jesus, who died so we can be forgiven, who came back from the dead so we can live forever, and who sent his Holy Spirit so we can follow him as our King.”

That part is not in the Bible text (well not so explicitly in that particular story) so why do they think I chose to do that?

Go on a journey

Having talked about the difference between the Bible text and the retelling, you can then take your child on a little journey based on the way that I explore the text in order to create the retelling. Essentially, I take the Bible story apart, and I do it by looking specifically at those elements that make any narrative work—the characters, the setting, and the problem. All basic literacy stuff!

So, I looked at Paul and at Silas and at the slave girl and at her owners and at the jailer. I made a list of what the Bible account says about each character. That is so that I can be faithful to what the Bible says, and also because it helps the character to come to life when I retell it. If that character appears in other Bible stories, it sometimes helps to read about them there, as well. In this case, you probably don’t want to read the whole of Paul’s story in Acts and the Epistles! But it might help to take a quick glance at his conversion in Acts 9, to discover the mission God has in mind for him.

As you explore each character, don’t just look for the facts about them, but also ask how they might have felt in different parts of the story. The idea is to build a picture of a real person—because they were real people! 

Next, I looked at the setting. Where are they? What time of day is it? What do things look like and feel like and smell like? And in the case of this story, what do they sound like? The setting often gives me clues as to how to retell the story. And that was definitely true with this book.

Finally, you want to help your child look for the main problem of the story. What drives it and pushes it along? What needs to be solved by the time the story is finished? Many children struggle with this aspect when it comes to writing their own stories. They get bogged down with description or dialogue and fail to understand how important it is to know where the story is going. Grasping the problem solves that.

Have a go

The last step is to encourage your child to create their own retelling of the story. To put into practice all that they have learned so far. A warning here—this is easier when the Bible texts are shorter. So don’t start with Noah! Or Joseph!

The passage from Acts 16 is probably about the right length. There is enough detail to work with, but not so much that they (or you!)  will get discouraged.

Their retelling doesn’t have to be complex. In fact, younger children might want to draw the different scenes to retell it. And I find that with many children, telling it out loud first, before they write anything down, is an easier first step. You can help them with that, in fact, with a gentle, “What happened next?”, “And what happened after that?”

Make it as playful as possible. Look for the fun, exciting, odd and unusual aspects of the story, and it will be a process you can enjoy together. And what is more, you will have covered religious education and reading and writing in one go. A homeschooling hat trick, if there ever was one!

Based on Acts 16, The Prisoners, the Earthquake, and the Midnight Song is a fun and compelling retelling of how a Philippian jailer and his family learned the wonderful truth about Jesus Christ.

The ascended Jesus’ ongoing power to save through the proclamation of the gospel and through the presence of the Holy Spirit is imaginatively and powerfully brought to life by Bob Hartman.