Bible Storytelling
This post is for those of us who believe that the bible will change your life as you are exposed to God through it. When we put our kids to bed they most often get the privilege of having a story told or read to them. My children usually beg me - please can we have one out the bible tonight? Please? About Paul maybe? Or David? How do we set our children up for success when it comes to loving the bible?
To start off with, if your kids see that you spend time reading and enjoying the bible, chances are they will want to imitate that. They want to be like you. But added to that, we need to make bible reading fun for them. Some kiddies' bibles are really dull, and simplified so that they seem to take all the interesting twists of the story out. I find that when I am telling my kids a bed time story, I look at the bible storybook and then rather tell it in my own words. I make it quite dramatic and stick to retelling only the exciting stories. (I am actually busy compiling some of those because I've found that lots of moms struggle to find bible stories that their kids are captivated by.) As a result, my children love bible stories, and would choose them over any other kids book any day. They love how I am looking at them, rather than the book, while I'm telling it, and I guess it helps that it mostly happens at bedtime, so it seems like a special privilege to be hearing a story rather than going straight to bed. One big thing when it comes to storytelling is to be prepared. If you want the story to be captivating you need to have read it before so you know it. I like reading it in the adult bible beforehand, because I find the original telling of the story full of all the interesting parts. Remembering what kind of adults we are hoping to release into the world one day helps us to correctly weight the amount of time we spend preparing to teach and teaching our children about the great truths and essential history in the bible.
