Bible Curriculum Review For Christian School

Bible Curriculum Review For this review I looked at Bible Truths for Christian Schools: Portraits from the Old Testament. Level B. It was published by Bob Jones University Press. Level B is intended for middle school students and more specifically, for eighth graders. This curriculum focuses on specific biblical people and therefore is arranged in a chronological order, not the order in which these people appear in the bible. Per the “to the teacher” page the purpose of this bible curriculum is to challenge young people to “emulate the heroes of the old testament” by having each lessons emphasis a “character quality that the student is to cultivate, an action he or she is to perform or a truth he or she is to believe” (Pg. v) Based on the

Because of the way this curriculum is set up, the lesson assumes that the students have read the scripture related to the lesson ahead of time. The teacher is given the theme, strategy and back ground information in a section called approach to the lesson. In this lesson the theme is loyalty and talks about how a godly Christian will be a loyal Christian. Next is the the strategy section, that has no true strategy at all, just tells the teacher that they need to teach their students how to strike a balance between disloyalty and blind loyalty to unworthy causes. It has no suggestions to how you do this. Finally, the background section has information about when the story takes place and what attribute the children are to learn from this biblical hero. The lesson itself is two pages of reading, another story that is used to illustrate the concept of loyalty and six “reinforcement questions”. There is also a worksheet in the back of the book but the lesson itself does not make a reference to it. The lesson has no true instructions but I’m assuming they expect the teacher to read the story to the children. The teacher may than bring up a few of the special problems and topics that are included or may

I feel that a lot of the time once children are out of elementary school, teachers have the tendency to forget active learning of any type and just have children read and answer questions. That’s all this lesson did. It’s also a very dry telling of the story and really forced the moral of the story down your throat. You were not going to walk away from this lesson without knowing that Ruth was loyal and how that was the whole point of this story. I found that I could barely focus on reading the story and had to start over several times. If I had to guess, I would say that if this lesson was read aloud by either the teacher or the eighth graders, most would be checked out after the first couple minutes. I was hopeful that maybe the activity portion would be better but was really put off that it was just another story with a few discussion questions. I honestly wouldn’t be excited to do this lesson, although it’s really easy, just because I think it over emphasizes the moral of the story, and is just plan boring. I know that I would have to redirect students often. If I had to teach this lesson I honestly would do a lot of tweaking. I would tell the story of Ruth instead of reading it aloud. After discussing how Ruth was loyal for a few minutes I would tell the Story of Mr. Bliss. We would than discuss the parallels in the two stories. Finally I would have the children draw or write about a time they were loyal or someone was loyal to