I had an interesting conversation with Jacob the other day which got me thinking on many levels. As we were icing our Easter biscuits, Jacob said (quite out of the blue) "you know mummy, when Peter denied Jesus in my [children's] Bible, it says that he did it because he was scared, but in the grown-up Bible that Megan read at Sunday School, it didn't say that. There was no excuse".My first reaction (I'm ashamed to admit) was to go and look it up as I could have sworn that the real Bible said that Peter was scared or something, but no, Jacob was right. There was no reference to Peter's fears, or to any other motivation.
My second thought was thankfulness that we had already bought him a Bible (NIrV) for Easter (thoughts like "yes! this is going to be such a hit" and so on - and it has been!).
My third thought was to ponder the relationship between children's Bibles and the 'real thing' (ie. full translations like CEV, NIrV and GNB). At what age/stage is it best to start reading from the real thing? Should we just start them off with the real thing from the beginning and ignore the existence of the children's Bible altogether? Or should we read the real thing and use the kids' versions not as Bibles but as collections of Bible stories, or as overviews of the big story of the Bible? (I think versions like the Jesus Storybook Bible and The Big Picture Story Bible fit into this category - for more info on these and other kids' Bibles, see this great little review post by Jean)
I'm not ready to burn the children's Bibles just yet, but I'm keen to hear your thoughts and experiences with helping kids to make the transition from kids' Bibles to full (children's) translations, and with the transition from having the Bible read to them to reading the Bible for themselves. (I'm assuming, of course, that in both transitions there is a fair period of overlap, and that the experience of hearing the Bible read continues on in some contexts right through to adulthood.)So... experiences? ideas? suggestions?
5 comments:
Hey Nicole,
already mentioned this on Jean's blog but I might mention here as well.
Our two eldest girls (9 and 6, nearly 7) are both on grown-ups Bibles at bedtime. We just read and have a little chat about the stories. After a few weeks of sort of doing it unintentionally with our #2 (actually, she insisted, she was really excited about having her own proper grown-ups Bible, even though it was only Luke's gospel) I thought to myself "Why haven't I been doing this always?"
Everyone enjoys it, you don't have to search through your memory to see whether the embellishments or omissions are significant, and it's the Word of God, not some hokey little kid's word game or picture puzzle as sold by Matthias Media ;-) where the answer to the deeply probing question is S-A-U-L or some such.
Matilda (9) even sat through the full list of names in Ezra 2 the other night. I think she just enjoyed sitting with me and reading, although by the end of the chapter she was looking a bit puzzled.
For the last year or so we've been reading the NIrV to our kids (boys, 8,6 and 4). The older 2 love it. Our little one misunderstands some of it and is often bored - but I can read to him at other times of the day.
The bigger kids love it. There's always new stories to hear and they're often violent. We also have much deeper discussions after reading from an adult bible than from a bible story book. Funny how our 6 year old asks the same questions as an adult in a bs group...
So far we've read right through 1 Sam, Mark, Joshua and Nehemiah. We're currently working through Genesis.
We've also used these bible comics on Jonah and Elijah. They're fantastic - http://www.staircasestudio.com/comics/index.html
Word for word bible text and pictures that show that the illustrator really knows his stuff.
I have no thoughts on transitions except that in a mixed aged family, someone will always get left behind. Our current thinking is that it's worth having our little one bored if it means that bible reading is something that we're all doing together. (He gets to draw pictures)
Good to think about.
First of all, I would like to say that it is great that your children are reading and looking at anything Godly and about God. I got saved six years ago and had my only child, Sean who was 3. I was 36 years old and single. I had a problem getting kid's Christian books initially and was happy to have anything!
Now Sean is 9 and a couple of years ago my new Christian husband (!) gave him his bible, NKJV. I thought this was a bit heavy but you know, we read to Sean from it most days and he reads it himself and there is no problem at all...
That's just my experience!
Ruth
I think that the Big Picture Story Bible is useful in teaching children a framework that can help them (and us!)to understand how the whole of Scripture holds together in a Jesus centred way.
I think of it not as a replacement for the full text Bible but as a device for training kids into a helpful understanding of how all the parts of Scripture fit into the unified whole.
We had a similar incident when Emma commented one day that she had trouble believing what she had heard Michael reading to the boys (from the NCV - great version btw) because it was not in her kids' Bible. We switched over for her too. We are getting younger with each child!
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